Sarah Barnard

Sarah Barnard is an award-winning professional polar artist and illustrator with a background in ocean exploration and marine biology. She has worked as a full time artist since 2015. She works in pencil, watercolours, acrylics, airbrush, pastels, and also makes cyanotypes.

Rather than a traditional art school education Sarah has prioritised backing up her visual work with real-world experience. She studied Fine Art in Cambridge, Marine Biology in Cornwall, and Ocean Exploration in Plymouth. She has also taken part in polar expedition training in Finse, Norway with Capt. Louis Rudd and Wendy Searle through the Shackleton company, was an artist in residence on the Arctic Circle Expedition Residency in Svalbard in October/November 2022, and the first ever artist in residence at the Shackleton Autumn School in Athy, Kildare in 2023.

Sarah has had a passion for polar exploration and history for many years, having attended school just around the corner from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. She has created artwork for establishments including the Mawsons Huts Foundation and the Explorers Club Great Britain & Ireland Chapter, the Antarctic Heritage Trust NZ and the Roald Amundsen's House Museum in Norway. Her illustrated Polar Explorers Playing Cards are sold as far North as the High Arctic (North Pole Museum, Longyearbyen) and as far South as Union Glacier Camp in Antarctica.

Over the past couple of years Sarah has exhibited her portrait work at Discovery Point in Dundee, exhibited a collection of cyanotypes at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Perth, and founded the Polar Artists Collective: which is currently a 70 strong community of artists, writers, poets and musicians making work inspired by the polar regions. In 2025, Sarah founded the Polar Book Club and is the founder and manager of Expedition Gallery.