The Book of Sarah
The Book of Sarah is missing from the bible, so artist Sarah Lightman sets out to make her own: questioning religion, family, motherhood and what it takes to be an artist in this quietly subversive visual autobiography from NW3. The Jerusalem Bible, Ellerdale Road, St Paul's Girls School and a baby monitor: books and streets, buildings and objects ll this bildungsroman set in Hampstead, North West London. Sarah Lightman has been drawing her life since she was a 22-year-old undergraduate at The Slade School of Art. The Book of Sarah traces her journey from modern Jewish orthodoxy to a feminist Judaism, as she searches between the complex layers of family and family history that she inherited and inhabited. While the act of drawing came easily, the letting go of past failures, attachments and expectations did not. It is these that form the focus of Sarah's astonishingly beautiful pages, as we bear witness to her making the world her own.
Sarah Lightman is a London-based artist, curator and writer. She completed an Art Foundation course at Central St Martins, attended The Slade School of Art for her BA and MFA, where she won The Slade Prize and The Slade Life Drawing Prize, and has a PhD from University of Glasgow in women’s autobiographical comics. She has extensively published her research. Her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.
Sarah co-curated Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, an internationally touring exhibition of 18 comic artists, that opened at 9 museums over 6 years. She edited Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014), that was awarded The Susan Koppelman Prize for Best Feminist Anthology (2015) and The Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Publication (2015), an Association of Jewish Studies/Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Jews and The Arts (2016).
Sarah has experience teaching and lecturing at undergraduate and graduate level including at the Universities of Glasgow (2018 and 2011-12), Roehampton (2011, 2012, 2018) and London College of Communications (2017). She has acted as an External Examiner for an MA at California College of the Arts. In addition, Sarah has led comics workshops at the Jewish Museum, London (2018), Glasgow Jewish Book Week (2018), JW3, the Jewish Community Centre for London (2012, 2013) and Koffler Centre for the Arts, Toronto (2011). She has also convened a Comics Study Day at The Slade School of Art (2014) and will be teaching at The Art Academy, London, in 2019.
Sarah also chaired the Women in Comics Conferences in 2009 and 2010, and, in 2009, co-founded Laydeez do Comics with Nicola Streeten, the most influential comics forum in the UK.
