Product Details
Description: "A collage of all things to do with the art of gathering hen collectables, there should be a special name for this sort of collector! This collection contains prize-winning hen rosettes, Staffordshire figurines, lead toys, a dexterity puzzle, ornamental hen eggs, cups and jugs. Hens are to be found everywhere once you start looking." Sarah Battle
Unframed paper size approx: 33.8 x 45.9cm (13.3 x 18.1 inches)
Unframed artwork size approx: 29.7 x 41.7cm (11.7 x 16.4 inches)
Framed size approx: 41.7 x 53.7cm (16.4 x 21.1 inches)
Date of Artwork: 2026
Location of Signature: Bottom right
Frame options: Black wood, putty wood, oak wood, white wood (with mount)
Please note: Our framers are recognised by the Fine Art Trade Guild for their quality because the custom frames have tightly pinned corners, and are made from precision cut wood in England, made bespoke for each order. All our frames are glazed with our Clarity+ Perspex. It's cut from the highest quality acrylic sheet that's both crystal clear, but also safe and filters out 99% of UV light to protect the artwork.
Read more about our FRAMING WORKSHOP here
THE STORY
Can you hear it? The rhythmic snip, snip, snip coming from the studio of Sarah Battle, nestled high up in the attic of an 18th century weaver’s cottage in the West Yorkshire hills. It’s a song that has been singing for many years.
This is a paper-cut artist who has been creating collage-works since her early days at the Royal College of Art in the late 1980’s. Since then she has been cutting a swathe through each decade, creating works for textile designers and a multitude of other products, rarely resting her trusty scissors.
In this new set of work for The Shop Floor, Sarah Battle has applied her processes of collage and paper-cutting to create a celebration of the garden; each one is full to bursting with the most magical imagery.
The motifs that populate the collages are a kaleidoscopic array of objects, including gardens, greenhouses, prizewinners at the country show and kitchen dressers displaying all sorts of treasures.
Individual motifs are precisely positioned, creating juxtapositions and visual discourses across and around the shared surface. This idea of collecting, grouping, or placing objects in a particular way is something Sarah investigates within her work, be that personal collections, books or the Pinterest feeds of others.
There is a graphic sensibility within Sarah’s work. It comes from a love of print, typefaces and advertising and from the material she has collected. Boxes and boxes of collected ephemera containing anything from old handwritten cheques, envelopes (a favourite is the printed security linings from bank envelopes), old tickets, adverts and receipt books.
Sarah says that “incidental patterns occur from the snippets of old receipt books; unexpected textures arise from the dotted tones of early commercial printing, while fragments of letterpress, typographic and handwritten words add to the texture”.
This can be seen in all of Sarah’s work, a particularly striking example is the use of handwriting from an old letter that scrolls across to create the scales of a fish.
The collages are full of this incredible detail; the bowl below, for instance, uses the bank envelopes printed with security linings, an absolute favourite material of the artist, which she uses again and again to great effect.
It is the discarded ephemera of our daily lives, cut up and reassembled that Sarah is breathing new life into. These are objects that give instant pleasure but entice us to look closer. Like exploring the interior of a dollhouse, scale becomes distorted and details are shrunken down so a potted geranium is as big as a chair and a watering can bigger than a dove. It’s a magical world, full of joyful details and surprising fragments.
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