Los Angeles-based painter and photographer Sarah Keliher Walsh spent her early years living between the urban sprawl of L.A. and the cobblestone streets of Geneva, Switzerland. The stark contrast between these two environments created a need for Walsh to explore place, accessibility, and longing specifically through landscape painting which would start with photographic reference she would take herself using a beat-up old Polaroid Land camera and a simple Polaroid point-and-shoot. The images she collected as reference for her paintings became works of art in themselves that she would intervene into with ink and oil paint and then scan and enlarge, pinning them again linen like butterflies. They are very much specimens of time and place for the artist and have become objects that she returns to again and again for reference.

Walsh earned her BFA in painting and then her MA in Arts Education and Disability Studies from Cal State Long Beach, where she lives and works. Traveling back to Geneva and its surrounding areas remains an integral part of Walsh’s practice, and she continues to make her home in both places.

Walsh has exhibited her paintings, photography, and, most recently, film in various galleries and institutions throughout Southern California and Switzerland.