Underfoot

15 Jan-14 Feb 2026

PV 15 Jan 2026, 6-8pm

Overview

The Gerald Moore Gallery is delighted to present Underfoot, a solo exhibition featuring a new series of textile pieces and paintings by Sara Dobbs, in the Paul Henderson Gallery. Informed by a background in agriculture, her practice explores the terrain as both a living system and a vessel of memory, history, and growth. Rather than a single physical surface, the land is dynamic, an intricate layering of soil, roots, insects and microbes, where what lies beneath sustains what is seen above.

The private view will be on Thursday 15th January from 6 to 8pm and the exhibition runs from 15th January to the 14th February 2026.

Rendered in saturated, non-naturalistic hues, the works depict American landscapes, mountains, trees, and bodies of water, refracted through layers of colour and perception. Each work captures not a single place, but the act of traversing a landscape: paths formed by repeated steps, traces that alter and inscribe the land.

At the centre of the exhibition, a large chiffon wall hanging extends these ideas, its translucent blocks of colour merging with the space, evoking the porous, layered nature of landscape itself. Together, the paintings and textiles consider how we move through, shape, and are shaped by the ground beneath our feet.

As part of the exhibition programme, artist Sara Dobbs will run a free Sculptural Insect Workshop on Saturday 24th January 2026 from 11am – 12:30pm where families will create their own insect sculptures using fabric and paper.

For more information and to book, please go to our website at www.geraldmooregallery.org.

Sara Dobbs is an American artist based in London whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, textiles, and sculpture. Drawing on her background in agriculture and her experience co-founding and managing a diversified farm on Vashon Island, Washington, Dobbs explores landscape as a living system shaped by memory, labour, and interdependence. Her work considers the terrain as both a site of sustenance and disruption, where layers of soil, roots, insects, and human action continuously transform one another. Dobbs’ community-focused engagement with food systems, including her leadership of the  Food Preservation Initiative from 2022–2023 at the Vashon-Maury Community Food Bank, informs her interest in the unseen infrastructures that support daily life. In 2023 she was commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture to create a public artwork for the Seattle Center’s Founders Court. Dobbs holds an MFA from the University of Oxford and a BA (Hons) in Painting from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of the Helen A. Rose Bequest, the Astair Prize, and the Alexander Flynn Bequest.