Goldstone says: “Sarah creates a very honest and charged experience in her paintings. They engage in a deeply expressive language that I would describe as ‘the familiar’ – like a universally experienced moment captured in all its vast and wild ways. She really pushes her practice and responds to what transpires in the process, which I love.”

Cunningham’s work evolves from intense observation of her environment. She explains: “I tend to go back to the same motifs and subjects in nature over and over. That repetition allows me to explore these very deeply, from different perspectives. There is always something more to be discovered.”

The artist melds these observations with her own personal experiences in nature, as well as dreams, art history, myths and literature. “I also collect found images and examine light phenomena in my own film photographs,” she says. “I use these references like a repository: things sit there, percolating for months, sometimes years. This is a way of processing my life. People always talk about abstraction and figuration, but actually, it’s a question of, how do you have both in the same place? And what is this sense of place in the work?”

Cunningham spends a lot of time looking at other artists’ paintings, “from Turner’s late watercolours and preliminary sketches from 1840 onwards, to Goya’s Black Paintings, and Bonnard’s intensely coloured canvases. De Kooning and Gorky also paved the way for decades of expressive figurative artists. I love how Suzanne Jackson and Vivian Suter go about taking painting somewhere else. I hold a lot of paintings very close to my heart.”

The artist says her greatest achievement so far has been receiving the Ali. H Alkazzi Scholarship award in 2019, which gave her the chance to study for an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Since then, success has come quickly, with her work being included in exhibitions in London, Aspen, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver. Head down to the Lisson Gallery to enjoy her works in all their rich intensity.