Photographs by Miguel Flores-Vianna
With an introduction by Fiammetta Rocco
Sarah Graham sees the natural world close-up. Taking plant and animal forms as her primary source, she focuses on one flower, insect, or skeletal structure, examining it from every perspective. In 2025, she uprooted to Africa, leaving behind the comfort of her London workspace for the wilderness of Kenya. In a makeshift studio she began creating work with what little she had to hand. The result was a powerful series of paintings and drawings that take inspiration from the untamed beauty of the East African landscape revealing both the wonder and strangeness of the natural world. In her boldest work to date, Graham pushes the boundaries of gesture and abstraction with forms that emerge through subtle ink washes, stains, and seepages; mottled pools spread and soak into the canvas, drying into glossy leaflike sheaths.
This beautifully illustrated publication, featuring photography by Miguel Flores-Vianna, chronicles Graham’s voyage of discovery as she painted and drew alongside roaming wild animals and local Samburu tribesmen. An accompanying essay by writer Fiammetta Rocco, who grew up on the very shores of Lake Naivasha where Graham worked, offers a personal account of the local surroundings and the artist’s presence within it, while handwritten notes and letters throughout provide Graham’s own reflections on an experience that profoundly transformed her practice.
Sarah Graham was born in Edinburgh in 1973. Between 1992 and 1996, she completed a joint master’s degree at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art in history of art and fine art. She has travelled extensively, including to Australia, Turkey, and the Far East, culminating in a journey on horseback across Central Asia in 1999. The Discovery Channel bought the documentary of the expedition, Beyond the Mountains of Heaven, which Graham co-filmed. She also spent many years travelling in the United States working for antiques dealer John Hobbs. She now lives and works in Chelsea, London, and has two children with husband James Holland-Hibbert.
Miguel Flores-Vianna is an Argentine-American photographer and author based in London, best known for architecture and interiors. He has worked for numerous publications including Cabana and Architectural Digest. In 2017, his Haute Bohemians was named the Design Book of the Year by the New York Times. In 2021, Miguel was made an Honorary Fellow of the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, in recognition of his photographic work that resonates ‘with deep sympathy for history and a keen sensitivity to colour, pattern, and light’. Since 2026, he has been a member of the Frieze Masters Council.
Fiammetta Rocco is an award-winning journalist, critic, and author whose work has been published on both sides of the Atlantic. Born and raised in Kenya, she read Arabic at Oxford and is a lifelong advocate of reading and the arts. She was culture editor of the Economist for almost twenty-five years and is the Emeritus Director of the International Booker Prize. Her book The Miraculous Fever Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure That Changed the World was published in 2003 in Britain, Europe, and the United States. In 2021, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
