Sarah Riley

Artist Statement

Sarah Riley’s work explores memory, identity, resilience, and the ways personal and cultural histories are shaped and reimagined. Working across printmaking, drawing, photography, and painting, she creates layered mixed-media works in which images overlap, fragment, and transform.

Her practice draws from myth, literature, art history, and personal experience, with recurring feminist themes. Recent series focusing on Camille Claudel, Séraphine de Senlis, and Daisy Miller examine women whose identities and creative lives were shaped by social expectations, restrictions, and the perceptions of others.

Riley’s process is intentionally experimental. She builds one-of-a-kind prints through multiple plates, printing techniques, ghost prints, photography, drawing, and paint. Each layer changes the meaning of what came before, allowing unexpected relationships between color, shape, and imagery to emerge.

For Riley, the process of layering becomes a metaphor for memory itself—fragmented, accumulated, altered, and continually reinterpreted. Her images invite viewers to discover connections between past and present, fact and imagination, and limitation and transformation. 

www.sarahriley.art | Instagram: @sarahriley_c329hua 

Biography

Sarah Riley is a painter and printmaker based on Cape Cod. She is Professor Emerita and former Head of Printmaking at Southeast Missouri State University.

Riley works across printmaking, drawing, photography, and painting, creating mixed-media compositions that explore memory, history, literature, mythology, and personal experience. Her work often incorporates feminist perspectives, particularly through her investigations of women artists and literary figures whose lives and creative identities were shaped by social and cultural restrictions.

Her recent series have focused on artists Camille Claudel and Séraphine de Senlis, exploring themes of artistic struggle, resilience, and restriction. Her series based on Henry James’s Daisy Miller considers Daisy as a proto-feminist figure and examines how her actions are interpreted by others.

Riley is also the author of Practical Mixed-Media Printmaking Techniques, published by A & C Black, London, in 2012. Her artistic process emphasizes experimentation and the accumulation of layers, combining traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques with photography, drawing, and paint.