Sarah Theresa Lee is a self-taught Irish artist based in London. She works as a psychiatric nurse and devotes the rest of her time to painting. Her subjects appear as if conjured from the layered sediment of memory, ritual, and dream.
Though she drew compulsively as a child, Lee was discouraged from pursuing art and abandoned it for years. She began painting seriously during the 2020 lockdown, when the world slowed and long-dormant images began to surface. Since then, she has made a daily practice of it—finding time in the early mornings and late evenings, often at her kitchen table, whenever she isn’t working. A couple of years into this rhythm, her home flooded, and she was once again isolated—this time in a hotel room with COVID. In that suspended stretch, she created a series of paintings that marked a turning point in her practice: distilled, hallucinatory, and more assured. When she began sharing her work publicly, the response was immediate and affirming.
Her process is intuitive and unscripted. She paints without preparatory sketches, guided by a mental archive she describes as a “cabinet” of images and scenes waiting to be retrieved. Her works resist categorization: unvarnished and uncanny, they speak in a visual language that feels privately developed—less learned than remembered. Though the imagery is often psychologically charged, Lee doesn’t see it as connected to her work as a mental health nurse. During the pandemic, she was part of a team specializing in treating acute psychosis—working with patients in crisis by day, and painting by night as a way to relax and re-enter a world entirely her own. In recent years, her work has gained wide attention, appearing in exhibitions throughout the UK, Europe, and the U.S. Still, she paints as she always has: instinctively, privately, and on her own terms.
Lee’s paintings operate like stage sets where the curtain never quite drops. Against domestic backdrops—striped wallpaper, modest beds, decorative lace—her protagonists enact scenes of eerie theatricality. A girl holds her own head like a bouquet; another reclines beside a grinning beast; a woman sits back on her heels with choreographed composure, dousing herself in liquid, while an automaton head reaches toward her, its tongue extended in a grotesque imitation of desire. Lee’s world hovers between girlhood and womanhood, mischief and menace, costume and confession. The humor is unmistakably dark, but never cynical; her figures seem complicit in their own strangeness. Painted in flat, deliberate planes with a touch of ornamental restraint, the works recall the intimacy of Mexican retablos while leaning, quietly, toward the surreal—somewhere between Leonora Carrington’s private cosmology and Leonor Fini’s erotic unease. Their charm lies in the contrast: beneath the blunt brushwork and stagey poise, something feral and unresolved remains.