First Friday Art Trail — Featuring Sarah Hope

Date: Friday, February 6, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Location: Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Downtown Vernon
Admission: Free | Everyone welcome

As part of Greater Vernon’s First Friday Art Trail, the Vernon Public Art Gallery is pleased to host local artist Sarah Hope for an open studio experience. Visitors are invited to drop in throughout the day to meet Sarah, learn about her creative process, and see her artwork in progress.

About the Artist
Sarah Hope is an autistic artist whose work is quite diverse, spanning from watercolour and oil paintings to hand dyed and handmade paper installations. Her themes have also traversed from the beauty of impermanence, grief and death, to women and neurodivergent researchers, to biodiversity and pollinators. Much of her artwork combines foraged and handmade materials with video, sound and lights to create immersive experiences. She also combines pigments made from rock and bone with traditional watercolour paint, creating paintings of local hummingbirds and owls that she photographs near her home. She has been extensively researching and creating with the under-represented mediums of handmade paper, natural dyes, and artist-made colour for many years. These multi-step processes are old crafts that align with her natural deep focus. Grinding rocks for colour or shredding plant fibres for paper both appeal to her needs to move the body and align with striving towards a sustainable art practice. By making slow art, she finds there is space created to process emotionally, which then transfers to the final work. Being recently diagnosed, she is still processing how her autistic traits such as sensory sensitivity and attention to detail have been instrumental in her art. Sarah has a diploma of Fine Arts and in 2023, she spent 6 weeks learning about the craft of fine paper at Penland School of Craft, North Carolina. With support from Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council, she has presented her work in various galleries as solo and group exhibitions. In 2019 Sarah won the Marie Manson Art award which launched her interest in artist-made palettes. Sarah is a settler born and raised in Tkemlúps, (Kamloops), and works on the traditional lands Switzmalph te Secwepémc, (Salmon Arm).

Discover more about the First Friday Art Trail and explore participating artists across Greater Vernon — or get involved as a featured artist at VPAG.
Learn More / Apply to Be a Featured Artist