Sara Richards (b.1969) studied three-dimensional craft at the University of Brighton, before undertaking an MA in the Department of Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art, London, which she completed in 2005. In a review of that year’s UK degree shows, Janice Blackburn wrote in the Financial Times that ‘RCA students represent our arts elite’ and Sara Richards is the ‘pick of the crop’. While at the RCA, Richards won a prize in the medal competition sponsored by the Royal Mint. In 2007 she was selected by BAMS to be the third participant in the society’s ‘New Medallist’ scheme, about which she gives an account in the Spring 2010 issue of The Medal. Long interested in arts, philosophies and religions of the east, the artist has made a medal that evokes the spiritual exercises of the whirling dervishes of Sufism, followers of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi. She writes: ‘I wished to make a medal that was evocative of the philosophy and symbolism behind the dance. I wanted to create a piece that invited the viewer/holder to participate and interact with it and to experience in some sense a parallel with the dervishes’ symbolic turning and spinning, their revolving in harmony with the atoms and the stars. Hence, this piece must be picked up and spun to appreciate the paradox of stillness in movement. For even though it spins in fast revolutions, in the centre there is to be found that quiet still place.’
A Song without Words II
A Song without Words II
By: Sara Richards, 2009
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 74mm
Cast by: Lunts Casting
Issue: The Medal, no 56 (Spring 2010)
Edition: 39