Inspired by her childhood fantasy of living inside a tree, Sarah Bedford's newest paintings traverse the slippery boundaries between nature and artifice, control and chaos, perception and deception. A bricolage of memory, the worlds she creates are self-propelled systems of beauty and order seeded by the vagaries of experience and longing. Foxes, squirrels, and birds frolic in leafless trees, parasitic flowers sprout on rocks, and solitary women shimmer under the haze of a blue fog. All inhabit a winter wonderland on the brink of spring. Teetering between representation and abstraction, they depict a dystopic Eden; where nature is both fanciful and imploding. Bedford's densely forested and decorative "nature-scapes" reveal an idiosyncratic facture in which thin and impastoed layers of paint, glittered surfaces, painterly drips of enamel, and airbrushed silhouettes meld in a single "painting." The emphasis on craft-like process and materials push her visual worlds into the realm of the sensual and feminine, evoking a desire to touch, smell and taste as much as to see.

Sarah Bedford was born and raised on remote ranch near Roundup Montana. She graduated from the Cooper Union, attended the Skowhegan residency program and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

.BELLWETHER is an artist-run space in support of emerging artists.