This print was created in conjunction with the Glasgow Print Studio 50th Anniversary Here & Now Legacy Project. The artwork “Queens Park Saviours” is inspired by the walks of Sara Alonso through Queens Park, located in the southside of Glasgow, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides being a thinking and breathing space throughout the pandemic, the park became familiar to the artist, turning into a part of her. The act of daily repetition of the same routes, mostly circular, paying attention to details and changes of the living elements of the park through its four seasons created a visual mantra in the mind of the artist. A strange symbiosis occurred when some of the centenary trees of Queens Park suffered of “Ash Dieback”: a deadly disease that has been spreading across Europe in recent years. Having lost her father to the pandemic, she found sympathy for the remains of these trees that appeared felled as lost corpses in the open spaces of the park, but also as symbols of resilience, of the power of nature to withstand adversity and bounce back.

Sara Alonso was born 1981 in Aranda de Duero, Spain and lives in Glasgow. She graduated with a distinction in MLitt Fine Art Practice - Print Media, at the Glasgow School of Art, 2015, and has been a member of the Glasgow Print Studio since then. It is at the Glasgow Print Studio that she expanded her practice, experimenting with diverse printing techniques: cyanotype, monotype, relief, and etching. With a background in Communication Design, Alonso uses found images, photography, and printmaking to create a poignant narrative through visual poetry. She explores her interest in the transitory nature of time. Pieces of her own reality are found and lost in surreal landscapes immersed in an atemporal spectrum. In her images each element lives intensely in a particular universe. In her work, Sara addresses universal themes such as the passage of time and the ethereal connection within each other’s lives, clearing the way for the senses to generate dreamy particular moods. Her practice is also linked to walking art; as part of her research exploring the idea of transition of time, Sara has completed three long pilgrimages where she has created visual walking diaries.