Born in South Africa, I trained at Edinburgh College of Art in the Ceramics department, completed a PGCE and then embarked on a rather diverse career which has included teaching looking after my children, working for an awarding body and latterly, running a small gallery space in addition to being an artist.

I love the process of looking and drawing, of making marks and exploring colours. This means that my work emerges as both highly figurative, completely abstract and at times, somewhere in between. In the past year, I have mainly worked from life, recording the moment between myself and the person who is with me, but often doing so over quite a long period of time. I believe that the work reflects something of the relationship that exists and evolves between myself and those who sit for me.
 
 


       
     
 
Sandra uses contemporary and recycled materials such as toy cars, planes and dolls to explore urban ideas in a form reminiscent of the iconography of her Italian background and heritage. Born and raised in London, and now living near Heathrow Airport, she has developed a fascination for the physicality and consciousness of the human individual within the collective unconsciousness that is the city.

Her works are seductive and hypnotic: sometimes macabre and surreal, sometimes abstract and beautiful. Landscapes of organically shaped ‘mountains’ made of plastic beads and wires also make an appearance in Sandra’s extraordinary world.

As with her box works, her drawings are drawings are obsessively intricate. She draws, sews and paints on the paper, mapping out these urban, human and natural energies.
 


       
     
 
I was born and educated in England before moving to Johannesburg, South Africa in my late teens. Initially I trained in the Graphic Arts and then went on to a working life in advertising and photography.

On returning to Britain in 1978, I worked for the photographic department of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. I came to Bristol in 1989 and was in a position at last, to give all my time to the study and practice of Fine Art.