Sarah Muirhead is a figurative artist who paints and draws objects of curiosity and bodies with an intense, voyeuristic tone. Graduating from Edinburgh College of art in 2009 she was named as one of “10 New sensations’’ by Kirsty Wark.

She has exhibited in galleries across the Uk including Lazarides and internationally in galleries such as Bernarducci Meisel in New York. Her solo show ‘Scopophilia’ was named as one of the top 5 exhibitions by White Chapel Gallery during Frieze week.

Muirhead’s paintings are included in private collections and public buildings such as Oxford University and Leith Theatre.

She peers at her subject through the lens of the female gaze and focuses on texture, touch, manic detail and scenes that are relatable yet unnerving.

Ornaments and objects are lovingly rendered however kitch or twisted they may be, while skin and flesh are depicted with tangible, pulsing, layered realism.

The diverse subjects in Muirhead’s paintings know they are being watched so their behaviour is altered and there is a knowing exchange between them and the viewer. The freedom of the medium and the context means that there is an academic excuse for voyeurism. There is no other context in which we are allowed to leer and scrutinise in this way-something Muirhead explores in her work. She acknowledges this exchange and creates backgrounds which are just wrong enough to allude to the artifice of the situation.

She provokes questions about control and assumption, of visual language and artistic convention. Juxtaposition is an important aspect of her compositions, using images and objects which infer something about each other and rendering them in a time consuming way that asks the viewer to take time to consider their reaction.

Muirhead's twenties were interrupted by a period of aggressive cancer treatment, survival, mortality and scarring has shaped her work since and the lens through which she sees her subjects, and perhaps, the world around her as she attempts to describe a duality of self-a body which betrayed her very existence and a person at odds with her shell.