Sara Davies is an artist using a range of media, materials, and technologies such as photography, performance and drawing to explore our changing relationship with place. She is interested in how places can be sites of enquiry, encounter and wonder, yet at the same time accommodate struggles over power, resources and visuality. Her research examines how histories are formed and maintained and how visual art practice can challenge their validity.
Sara recently completed an arts practice-based PhD focusing on the role of making in diasporic subjectivity formation. Drawing on her own experience of migration from Sweden to the UK, she employed her art practice as a form of place-making activity. Her visual practice dismantled narratives associated with nation, revealing how ideas of home and belonging are infinitely more complex and ambiguous but it also materialised her loss, something that had a soothing effect of her sense of uncertainty.
More generally, Sara’s research explores the between, it looks as art practice as a space of connectivity that brings together places we remember, dream of and imagine with the materiality of our daily lives. The process of collaging, as an idea and a material process, lies at the core of her practice. Bringing together disparate times, places and voices in conversation, it supports the formation of borderland, non-essentialist perspectives.
