Mrs. is pleased to announce Fangs and fruits, and falling trees, a solo exhibition of new works by Sarah Bedford. Created during her year at the Sharpe-Walentas Residency Program, this series sees Bedford merge still life and landscape traditions, taking inspiration from necropastoral poetry where idealized natural scenes intertwine with themes of decay, transformation, and mystery. Her paintings become layered explorations of memory, ecology, and the natural world's regenerative cycles.

Bedford’s creative process begins with gouache studies on paper, which she then translates to canvas using loose acrylic washes, layered oil glazes, and oil pastel accents. With a restrained palette of jade greens, sulfur yellows, and earthy carnelian reds and browns, she choreographs plant, rock, and seed forms into twisting, rhythmic movements. Her flowers bend and droop as if alive, forming shifting, self-contained ecosystems. Like pomegranates splitting open or wasps boring through volcanic stone, these works embody time in motion; flux, rupture, and regeneration.

Working with an earthen, mineral-rich palette, Bedford depicts elements like thistles, cocoons, milkweed, and night crawlers, symbols of life unfolding beneath the surface. Her compositions evoke the unseen vitality of the underground, where roots twist with time and emotion, and where endangered species, such as the Ghost Orchid or the lost Sophora Toromiro tree, appear grafted onto vines, carnivorous plants, and fallen fruit. From these juxtapositions, hallucinatory hybrids emerge. Strange, primordial forms suspended between growth and decay, earth and sky, deepening the sense of geologic time across her canvases.

In Wooly devil, Bedford portrays a newly discovered species from Big Bend National Park, nestled within a glowing yellow cavern. These tiny, furry plants, tucked into dark crevices, hover on the threshold of life like chrysalises about to unfurl. This tension between concealment and release mirrors the emotional currents running through Bedford’s work, where the natural world serves as a site of both grounding and transcendence. Elsewhere, corkscrew Ghost Orchids hover, oversized and moth-like, fluttering through swampy, moss-covered fields.

Deeply connected to nature and plant life, a bond rooted in her upbringing on the wide plains of eastern Montana, Bedford’s floral paintings challenge genre conventions, offering a feminist narrative that emphasizes cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. By incorporating extinct and uncanny flora, she highlights life's fragility and evokes both remnants of a lost world and the possibilities of unknown futures.

In Fangs and fruits, and falling trees, Bedford transcends a mere reflection of the natural world, instead revealing its interior life; a space where beauty and loss coexist, and where transformation is constant, quiet, and profound.