About

I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin nation who are the traditional custodians of the land on which my studio stands. I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that this land was never ceded.

Sarah Tomasetti is highly regarded for her luminous fresco paintings and installations. She has gained substantial knowledge and training in the traditional methods of fresco, using materials that have been employed since antiquity. The fresco surfaces that form the basis of her work are made on a wall constructed from lime putty mortar and then detached by means of a cloth embedded early in the process. Landscape images are then brushed drawn and incised, tracings of stone into a surface itself returning to stone. Detachment and the addition of staining and encaustic wax reveal the internal structure of the fresco skin, thus embedding a sensed fragility in the substrate of the work. These landscapes seek to explore our shifting relationship with the natural world in an atmosphere of contemporary unease.

Sarah Tomasetti graduated from RMIT University and La Trobe University, Melbourne with graduate diplomas in Fine Art and Italian Studies in 1994. After graduating, Sarah undertook an internship in fresco painting at the Laboratorio per Affresco di Vainella in Italy and, on returning to Australia, completed a Masters in Fine Art at RMIT University. She has undertaken further residencies in China, Fiji, Italy and the USA and has numerous solo and group exhibitions to her name. Winner of the acquisitive John Leslie Art Prize at the Gippsland Art Gallery in 2020, Sarah also has work represented in a number of private and public collections including Artbank, Macquarie Bank, BHP Billiton, National Australia Bank and Grafton, Tamworth and Muswellbrook Regional Galleries.

Sarah is a lecturer in Fine Art at RMIT University and has recently completed a doctoral project entitled Mnemonic Mountain, looking at the way the mountain imaginary co-creates the way remote regions are traversed and depicted. In response she developed the fresco skin as a fluid sculptural form responsive to cycles of land formation and disintegration.

EDUCATION

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

COLLECTIONS

GRANTS

AWARDS

RESIDENCIES & TRAVEL