Sarah Wiens is an artist and mother originally from Vancouver who has been creating and teaching art in the Okanagan Valley for many years. She has exhibited in numerous small group and solo shows across the province, and her works are included in private collections in North America as well as international publications. She also collaborated on public mural projects in 2020 and 2023.
She paints primarily with acrylics, often combining them with pencil and pastel. Her work focuses on observing, analyzing, and depicting natural processes in the Okanagan. One series followed the foraging paths of bees; later, after devastating wildfires in the region, she turned to painting charred trees and the new vegetation growing up between them as a way of processing the transformed landscape.
For the Ore Mountains, Sarah created two landscapes inspired by Rolava and Měděnec. She draws a parallel between Canada and the Ore Mountains: just as Canada long avoided speaking openly about the injustices and tragedies of residential schools for Indigenous children, the stories of injustice, forced labor of political prisoners, and expulsions in the Ore Mountains have often remained unspoken.
Yet, as Sarah suggests, these histories are inscribed in the very DNA of the landscape and the people who live there. Her paintings trace these layered histories—told and untold, shared and unshared, public and private.