ARTISTS’  STATEMENT & BIOGRAPHY

My practice is based in photography and film and has extended into publication and performance.  My recent work has focussed on re-enacting and repurposing historical works of literature or cinema as a means to animate present-day concerns. As a whole, my work reflects on the central position of photography and cinema in relation to questions of representation, realism and authorship. 

My recent Arts Council funded film The Donkey Field (2021), weaves a link between an antisemitic  attack on a young boy on a piece of common land known locally as ‘the donkey field’ and the story of the persecution of Marie & Balthazar in the acclaimed film Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966). The Donkey Field features a text, based on sections of a childhood memoir of Budapest in 1944, and scenes which re-enact and reframe Bresson’s allegorical story about the scapegoating of innocent subjects.  Partly shot on the streets of present-day Budapest, under a regime criticized for its anti-immigrant policies and harsh treatment of refugees, The Donkey Field underlines the relevance of the boy’s story to other, more recent stories of displacement and persecution. 

 Published by Four Corners book, as the tenth in its series of artists republications of classic literature  another solo project was The Overcoat (2015) which comprised a republication Nikolai Gogol’s classic novella. The darkly humorous short novel (1842) tells of the life of a lowly and impoverished government clerk whose existence is briefly transformed by a new coat.  The book included a new body of photographs that depict commercial vitrines in London and Paris. The photographs considered these displays in relation to the confusion of surface appearance with reality that figures both in the story and on the streets of the city.

Other recent projects include the performance and photo prose poem work Bees in a Hive of Glass made in collaboration with novelist Tom McCarthy commissioned by TANK and Whitstable Biennale (2018).  The work looked at the phenomena of the vitrine like spaces also known as 'acoustic pods' that are a common feature of contemporary office environments. The text and images together reflected on the ideology of transparency which informs the design of these spaces which produce silent displays of labour and productivity. McCarthy's poetic text made eclectic references to Ovid, psycho-analysis and science fiction  whose content linked to the manifestation of  glassed in space. Initially made for print in TANK, it was later staged as a live performance for Whitstable Biennale, with actor/models and a recorded reading of the poem set in an atmospheric soundscape.

Another film Hidden in Plain Sight (2015) commissioned for the Centre d’art et photographie de Lectoure (Gers, France), looked at the figure of the petty thief as featured in Robert Bresson’s acclaimed film Pickpocket. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, when international corporations financial sleights of hand came to light , this work re-constructed passages from Bresson’s film alongside a newly scripted text authored by myself,  to reflect on the contemporary resonance of the thief’s brazen use of illusion and misdirection to avoid being caught.

Recent solo exhibitions and projects include at The Donkey Field at Danielle Arnaud,  Imperial War Museum, CAST (Helston), Glassyard Gallery (Budapest) and BALTIC, Gateshead, Principles & Deception at Or Gallery (Vancouver) and FILET (Hoxton) and Bees in a Hive of Glass in TANK (2018) &  Whitsable Biennale. Group shows include Home and Abroad, Olomouc Museum of Contemporary Art, The Vanishing Point in History with Matthew Buckingham, Lina Selander and Uriel Orlow for L’ete Photographique de Lectoure, City Lives at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, The London Open (Whitechapel Gallery)(2012), On the Nature of Things, Kamloops Art Gallery, Troubled Water,  Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei, Theatres of the Real, FotoMuseum Antwerp, Belgium; Darkside II, FotoMuseum Winterthur, Switzerland and Twenty Second Hold & Studio/Location Photographs, Works/Projects, Bristol, Sarah Dobai: Photographs & Film works, Kettles Yard, Cambridge, Above the City, Artist’s Space, New York, Sodium Dreams, Bard College, New York, September Horse, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago di Compostella.

I completed an MFA at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (’93-95) and have since lived and worked in London where I am a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL).