Sarah Brown was born in England and arrived in Australia in 1974 with her family. She grew up in Maryborough on the Queensland coast where she started both painting, and had her first three exhibitions, and discovering Australia’s Indigenous cultural history. She then trained in nursing and as a health educator in Sydney and Adelaide and soaked up the creative stimuli of those cities.

In 1992 when Sarah arrived in the Northern Territory as a newly-minted 24-year-old health professional, she was sent immediately to teach Indigenous health workers in Kintore, a 550km drive from her new home base in Alice Springs.

There was no time for making art in those early years of remote travel; solitary posts as a Remote Area Nurse (RAN); and raising three children under five. The urge to paint was insistent however and after Sarah had painted the walls, ceilings and all the cupboard doors at home, family consensus was that she’d better start on canvas.

Over the last twenty-four years Sarah has worked in many remote Northern Territory communities as a nurse and health educator; has had three children; developed as an artist; and established in Alice Springs the Purple House, the headquarters for Western Desert Nganampa Waltja Palyantjaku Tjutaku (WDNWPT) which translates as ‘keeping all our families well’. WDNWPT is the leading organisation in its field in Australia. In the last decade it has set up and operates eleven remote Indigenous community dialysis centres, with more to come.

Since 2005 Sarah has had eight solo exhibitions and shown work in five group shows. Her medium is acrylic (her first work in Maryborough was in water colour) and she starts each canvas with a deep red ground, mixing her colours from a deliberately limited palette of white, red, yellow and blue. Her style is deceptively simple; her effects are achieved by a precise observation of the light on her subject - the landscape - making it appear palpable: a sensuous experience. Her influences are several: Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters; local artists’ work, especially Rod Moss’s, with whom she had some technical guidance early on in Alice Springs; and over-arching and ever present the extraordinary, unique, ancient, intensely alive landscape of central Australia.

In the Northern Territory of Australia where Sarah has lived for the last 24 years, being called a mongrel dog is not necessarily a term of abuse. Australian humour is typically ironic, dry, and contrary. Mongrel dogs – of which there are many in the outback – are brave, ingenious, adaptable, tough and extraordinarily tenacious. All of which are qualities that Sarah shares, and which were noted fondly by fellow artist and Territorian Chips Mackinolty, when he opened one of her Alice Springs exhibitions and compared Sarah to a mongrel dog.

Chips was also referring particularly to Sarah’s other work - as the pre-eminent advocate for Indigenous people living with renal disease in central Australia.