Sara van Vliet

In the summer of 2024, I started documenting my solo cycling journeys through short video vlogs, originally intended for friends and family. What started as a casual form of sharing gradually became a more integrated part of my practice. Almost a year later, I now realize that the act of long-distance cycling itself, and making those vlogs, became an extension of my artistic research.

For a long time, I kept my athletic and artistic lives separate. I competed in long-distance speed skating at a high level, while simultaneously pursuing art at the art academy. Both environments urged me to choose, to commit fully to one discipline. And they were right in one respect: focus is necessary for depth. I eventually stepped away from competitive sports, but the physical commitment, the repetition, and the mental endurance that defined that part of my life never disappeared.

In recent years, I've been searching for a way to bring these two apparently distant practices, art and endurance sport, into conversation. Both rely on discipline, dedication, and a capacity for reflection.

Cycling, especially over long distances, offers a particular kind of mental space: a state of slowness, absorption, and quiet awareness. It is within that space that new ideas surface, often uninvited. 

Each year, I set out on a long solo cycling trip, and along the way I make a daily work on paper, it can be a drawing or a watercolour painting, always from direct observation, sometimes from the landscape immediately in front of me once I've set up camp for the night. And for Istanbul I’m looking more for seneries I want to capture.
 These drawings form an analogue record of the journey, a diary written in line rather than word.

I'm particularly interested in the influence of repetition, fatigue, and solitude on the act of drawing. What happens when you commit to a gesture every day, under changing conditions and in a state of physical depletion? How does the body shape the hand, and how does movement shape perception?

The resulting works take different forms depending on the journey,  publications, paintings developed from the visual memory of the road, and short films, together forming an ongoing body of work that explores the relationship between artistic and athletic labor, between the studio and the road.

Or maybe even more, how to use the road as part of my studio?

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