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.
Sara Davies has a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design awarded in 1999 and an MA in Visual Culture from Manchester Metropolitan University awarded in 2003. In the broadest sense, Sara’s artistic practice focuses on exploring how our experience of place is affected by processes of globalisation, migration and new technologies. In a more specific way, this was the focus of her practice-led PhD project completed in 2024 titled Creating Images of Belonging through Diasporic Touch.
Sara has presented her research at many conferences such as: Association for Art Historians New Voices conference Image Matter: Art and Materiality (2015) at Manchester Metropolitan University, Writing Between the Lines at Cardiff Metropolitan University (2016), Nordic Research Network Bridges Between at University College London (2016), Nordic Research Network The North as Home at University of Aberdeen and the international conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Heritages of Migration: Moving Objects Stories and Home organised by Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham and UNTREF Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (2017).
Over the years, Sara has shown her work in venues such as Paper Gallery, Fact Liverpool, Rogue Project Space, Nexus Art Café, Holden Gallery and Grosvenor Gallery. She undertook two residencies and exhibited at Sidney Nolan Trust as well as recently starting another residency at Manchester Art Gallery’s Platt Hall which will lead to an exhibition.