Sara Lee

Sara Lee was born in Wales in 1956 and lives and works in London. She graduated in Fine Art Painting from Ravensbourne in 1979 and took an MA in Printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design (now part of Central Saint Martins), graduating in 1982. Her studio practice spans drawing, film, and print — including etching and Japanese-tradition woodblock — and is consistently rooted in landscape, typically worked through extended on-site observation followed by long studio reworking in print form. Her woodcut method belongs to the lineage of Japanese ukiyo-e and mokuhanga rather than Western relief: she works from multiple blocks, applies water-based gouache directly to the block with brushes for each impression, and hand-prints onto Japanese paper, exploiting the medium for its painterly qualities.

That technical orientation reflects her broader role as a bridge between contemporary British printmaking and Japanese practice. She has written on print for Tate, and has advised and spoken on print processes for institutions including the Art Fund, the Royal Academy Schools, and the Hatton Gallery; she also teaches at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. She has a long association with Rabley Gallery and the Rabley Drawing Centre in Wiltshire, where she has exhibited and developed successive bodies of woodblock and gouache work, often built around a specific landscape; recent series include Isola (2016), the Morning Series, and Province, responding to coastal and rural sites.

Earlier in her career she co-founded Print Centre Publications and worked for more than a decade with the master printer Hugh Stoneman on editions by senior British artists including Terry Frost, Ian McKeever, and Eileen Cooper. She continues to collaborate with Eileen Cooper RA on etching and woodcut projects, publishing with her under the Blackbird Editions imprint.

Her exhibition history includes the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition in Tokushima, Japan (2021) and Against the Grain: Contemporary Woodblock Prints at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2022), and she was selected for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference exhibition in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture. Her dealer representation is principally through Rabley Gallery and the Rabley Drawing Centre in the United Kingdom, with editions also handled by SO Fine Art Editions in Dublin and the Stoney Road Press print studio. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Pallant House Gallery, the Swindon Museum and Gallery, and the Otter Gallery at the University of Chichester. Lee's place in the contemporary British print scene is twofold — a senior printmaker-publisher with a long collaborative track record at the workshop level, and a working mokuhanga practitioner whose recognition in the international Japanese-print community has expanded notably since 2021.