Belgian illustrator Sarah Wouters prints a series of screenprints that strikes a rare balance between heartbreaking and hilarious, finding in the completely specific absurdity of everyday life something that feels uncomfortably universal.
The scene is complete. A big pink man has somehow got himself into a tiny yellow paddling pool in a back garden. His wife is watching from the window of a blue shed. The dog is just standing there, taking it all in. Sarah Wouters has captured something universal.
Normal People is a series of six screenprints, each 50 by 70cm, and it does what Wouters does best: takes the completely specific absurdity of domestic and everyday life and renders it with the visual confidence of someone who has spent decades noticing exactly the wrong, perfect detail. Poolboy is joined by prints including a Pooh, a Romeo, a Swan Lake and a Surfin’ Bird, each one staging a scenario that sits somewhere between heartbreaking and hilarious. “There is always someone or something in any scene who has absolutely no idea what to do,” she says. “I find those people, and those animals, very relatable.” The humour is always in the arrangement: who is watching, who is oblivious, and what everyone else is choosing not to say.
Wouters has been illustrating since she first picked up a pencil in her hometown of Halle in Belgium, accumulating over twenty years of work across magazine covers, children’s fashion, CD covers, advertising and more. Her digital practice has expanded into screenprinting, linocut and ceramics, with the move into print giving her absurdist sensibility a physical texture it clearly suits. The scratchy, layered quality of the screenprint adds a layer of life to the flat unreality of the image.
Sarah Wouters is a Belgian illustrator with a quirky, upside-down view of life and an obsession with all that is absurd and downright weird. Based in Belgium, her work playfully reflects the bizarre in the everyday.
Website: sarahwoutersillustrator.com Instagram: @sarahwoutersillustrator / @saharawouters
Normal People. Screenprints, 50 × 70cm. Series of 6.
