Discipline
Conceptual
Installation / Land / Site-specific
Kinetic/Mobile
Political/Religious
Material
Brick/Concrete/Plaster
Bronze
Ceramic/Clay
Found Objects
Glass
Metal (other)
Region
London
Biography
Si’s work explores the human condition which is at the centre of her practice relating it directly to her own experiences during the American invasion of Panama. So, it is place, movement, materials, and politics that act as the signifier, her work is coming from a place that wants to understand trauma.
In her most recent work, engraving drawings and text on to found glass objects she re-presents memories from her own life accrued through diaries, drawings and text, with their different histories and place of origin, the glassware becomes united through the engraving process.
She is best known for her kinetic installations using old furniture to express issues such as protest, global warming and domestic violence.
She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad, including National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy, Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust, Compton Verney Gallery, Zabludovicz Collection.
“Si Sapsford again focuses our attention not only on the possible implication of, ‘a more man made than natural’ disaster, but also touches on the more personal/individual effects of these events.” (Linden Gallery, Australia)
Si Sapsford draws on her history of adapting and animating household objects to create sculptural metaphors for human situations and conditions, and on her early experiences as a long-distance sailor. In Civil Unrest, Sapsford continues to explore both her fear and fascination with the change that can overtake normally civilized people, and the triggers that can make a peaceful crowd explode into something other than civilized. “I want ‘civil unrest’ to sit uncomfortably with the viewer. I think of it in quite a traumatic way because what we might think of as filmic is actually happening in reality in real time. Whilst we might stand or sit or drink a double espresso, on the other side of the globe there are people being water boarded. There is somebody trying to climb a fence trying to hand their child over to safety.”