Sara Pope's work is instantly recognisable. Her hyperreal style creates a tension with her subject matter, and we are totally seduced by it.

Sara's career long fascination with the human face, and specifically the mouth, has shaped the journey she's on today. We took a deep dive with Sara into her practice, what she gravitates towards, what aliveness means in an image, and where she's excited to go next.

Sara's creative journey didn't start as you might expect. She was studying mathematics, but was still drawn to creative processes. She went on to study graphic design in Barcelona, before beginning work as a shoe designer. She enjoyed the work, but it wasn't the job of her dreams. When a break in the company left her with four months out of work, free to make art and experiment, she knew she could never go back.

Sara is a self taught artist, so when she began her painting journey she was guided entirely by her subconscious. And it guided her right towards the human mouth.

Sara is drawn to mouths because they are so unique and expressive. Each person is so different, and by presenting a mouth alone, you are able to show a portrait of a person.

It's an incredibly personal thing to paint. We read the anatomy of a mouth without realising it, picking up on the muscles and micro changes involved in speech the moment someone starts talking. It is an unconscious connection.

Sara describes the mouth as "wet with this aliveness". And this shine is evident in her work, created with her oil painting technique, her varnishing and sometimes her use of crystals.

The mouth is very rarely still, and the expectation of movement is part of what makes Sara's paintings so unique and expressive.

Every piece begins with a photoshoot. Sara and her subject work through a huge number of shots in one sitting, using a makeup brush, lipstick and camera to bring out the shape and dimension of the mouth. The photos themselves aren't the art, Sara says, but they capture enough of the person for her to build from.

From there, she studies the expressions closely, working through sketches and digital drawings, mapping and reworking the shape until it feels right. This sits alongside the painting like a running sketchbook of ideas. When she moves to the canvas, it's built up in layers of oil paint, blended and smoothed at every stage, sometimes with lipstick worked into the mix. What emerges is a glossy and irresistible piece of work that echoes the polish of an advertising campaign.

Alongside oil painting, Sara uses varnish, gold leaf, printing onto perspex, hand applied crystals, printing onto aluminium and screenprinting, choosing whichever technique the piece calls for.

Sara's work carries an influence from the fashion industry, taking inspiration from Haute Couture and beauty trends. She captures the glamour and power conveyed by the lips and mouth, raising questions around ideals of beauty and femininity, while her painting style imitates the slickness of advertising even as it subverts its themes. Her background in graphic design and fashion has played a part here too.

Sara names Hajime Sorayama, the Japanese illustrator known for his precise and unreal depictions of female robots, as an inspiration. His images are futuristic and, much like Sara's own work, meticulously created.

That same instinct connects Sara to her most recent collaboration, with Formula 1, working on a piece for Escapade Silverstone. The work, Pole Position, is available here at EDiT. It features a female face in a large, shiny racing helmet, eyes locked in, ready for the race. Here Sara captures a split second moment, shaping the light and texture of the race into a single image.

She combined that idea with a racing helmet borrowed from a lead instructor, working towards an expression with pupils blown wide, holding all the tension of what's about to come.

Sara points to the reflections and the moisture as the parts of a painting that carry that 'aliveness' and says she can step back from a canvas and tell, from across the room, whether it has arrived there yet.

There's a tension right at the centre of Sara's practice. Every lip is rendered luscious and immaculate, pulling straight from the visual language of glamour and desire, and yet it's exactly that polish which turns into the critique. Sara isn't just celebrating the image, she's questioning it too, and she's comfortable handing the viewer both readings at once rather than picking a side for them.

Looking back, Sara has always been drawn to the mouth, a subject that embodies the world she wants to embrace and challenge at once. It's all about communication, and portraiture and capturing a person or a moment. That Sara has let intuition guide the way for her practice is essential in how she has emerged. She trusts her gut.