portfolio
Sarah Dixon is a British-Irish artist with an academic background in biology and ethnobotany, followed by a career in graphic design and marketing. She developed her socially-engaged practice through MA Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins. Her practice-led work explores magic and ritual, embodiment, animism, natural ecologies, care, reproduction and relational culture.
body-in-body of water
Like a river, everything (and the human) is always and never the same
You can name me but I only am a pattern, a shape. We can’t be held – or only gently.
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This piece is an exploration of relationship-building between artist Sarah Dixon and the River Frome in Gloucestershire as “riverkin”. Made as part of MA Performance: Society, Central Saint Martins UAL.
To watch this film it is recommended you use a large, full screen or projection, a dark space, and perhaps hide under a blanket or towel.
CW – Content warning for survivors of water trauma (near drowning, injury, flood shock).
Immerse yourself and try not to understand.
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Collecting clay from the river’s source I made a painting on gessoed linen and then took the painting to the river to play.
I experimented with many ways of looking into, through and under the river, and giving glimpses of the body/face.
Film 9m 02sec.
combing the common
A short film made using an intuitive approach, as part of an Imprint Collective embodied documentary program.
Viewing 2min 38 sec
Directed by Sarah Dixon
Produced by IMPRINT Documentary Collective
This film was made as a part of the November 2024 filmmaking workshop “Bodies of Water” with IMPRINT Documentary Collective
© Sarah Dixon 2024
Taking as a starting point the need to comb nits from my daughter’s hair, I followed the IMPRINT method of body-listening to find an idea for a performance and to record it.
The common is thought to be a “natural” place of beauty and tranquility. In making this short piece I found it to be a place of heavy traffic and micro-aggression.
The ritual of combing grass evoked girlhood memories of fairy tales where a protagonist has to complete an impossibly large domestic task in order to escape some kind of curse.
imperfect tarot
This is my MA Thesis in the form of an imperfect and ecofeminist tarot deck, accompanied by a visual essay.
“I and my work resist synthesis so in this struggle to condense and explain, for this [MA thesis] essay, I am likely to fail.
As a way of addressing this crisis I have created a Tarot, named Imperfect. This collection of 78 cards serves as a method to hold my sense of complexity, and to generate a ritual as a buffer against performance anxieties. We will take a look at how this is a performance device and its evolution, both in human culture and how it emerged from my own practice at this stage.
In choosing Tarot.. each [card is] representing something from my practice over the past two years. It forms a kind of album of work, an interactive portfolio and a tool for visual essay writing, that references the Past and foretells the Future whilst holding a continuous presence in space and thought. The Spreads are explored as a way to demonstrate this method of Tarot.
This way the themes, content and subject matter keep reappearing and overlapping to make a sensory layering of information. I work in circles and spirals rather than direct lines.“
supercritical readings
“Twenty-four postgraduate students from across Central Saint Martins were selected from an open call to work with the scientists, responding critically and creatively to the research presented. Through a week of experimentation knowledge, concepts, and processes were exchanged between disciplines, with new perspectives and interpretations presented back to the scientists and to a public audience.“
This interdisciplinary residency was a collaboration between UCL, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Central Saint Martins UAL. I worked with fellow student resident Freya Shi to explore magic and ritual in the science lab.
We created a custom oracle deck using words collected from the residency group, and used these and two Tarot decks to communicate with fruit flies, and machines called Hunter, Hope and MBraun in the lab.
The fruit flies were surprised that we were talking to them and further research with the flies could be an interesting next step. In mediating between machine and human we created an opportunity for researchers to reflect and reframe their thinking about their relationship with the machines who were seen as “difficult” “unpredictable” or “reliable” and “enjoyable” to work with. Discussion of fruit flies provoked ethical questions, and the possible dissonance of awareness of using living beings in research.
alma mater
This is a performance about the “Alma Mater”, or boarding school. There is a film and a piece of performance writing being prepared for publication in a new book on Myths and Mothering from Demeter Press for 2025.
Exploring these questions: if we take “Alma Mater” seriously as a mother figure – then who is she? Why does she behave this way, and what does she really want? Could she desire to be free of the institution? Is she a puppet of class violence, or an agentic force? A monster, a madwoman or a Colonial Matron? Using performance and embodiment I will be making an art practice enquiry into the Alma Mater and how her energy might be changed, liberated or contained to address the historic and contemporary suffering and violence perpetrated by the institution upon both its most treasured and most marginalised children. Performance writing along with references to academic and popular writing and media, will bring to life the Alma Mater for a new, decomposing examination.
SURGE III – GUT FEELINGS
A collaboration with Ryman Hashem, Senior Research Fellow at UCL medical engineering center WEISS. We explored the experience of participants who had Hyperemesis (extreme sickness) in pregnancy. Ryman’s work is in making soft robot models of the stomach. Out of this project he has made a new moving silicone model of the uterus.
The Baby Makers: Making History
With Sharon Bennett as The Women’s Art Activation System, this National Lottery Heritage funded project brought missing histories to Stroud’s Museum in the Park.
The Baby Makers: Making History set out to establish reproductive and birth histories in the Museum collection as a little-recorded but important part of our collective heritage.
Working with key partners Stroud Against Racism, and Stroud Local History Societies, we have uncovered diverse memories and experiences to do with the maternity services, fostering and adoption, loss, and birth-related stories across the District.
Working with Stroud Local History Societies we have been finding out what giving birth was like in Stroud over the decades and how practices and meanings have changed over time.
Thanks to National Lottery players we have collected new material for the Museum in the Park archives.
We have made a documentary film and a performance artwork film, showcasing the histories.
One of our participants, Dee Guthrie, created a new display about the Windrush community in Stroud, for the Museum foyer, and we held a project celebration event in November at the Museum. We collected 12 oral histories in 5 hours of new recorded and transcribed material for researchers, historians and the public to access. There is a new series of birth history collection items donated to the Museum.
the bureau for the validation of art
A collaboration with artist Sharon Bennett, The WAAS is known for playful institutional critique and explorations of the maternal experience.
In The Bureau For the Validation of Art we complete questionnaires and interview subjects to determine whether work is Art.
Items found to be Art receive a certificate of Validation and should be displayed with the certificate in order to reassure the public and audiences of the status of the art object.
The BFTVOA has appeared at Art Licks London, The Old Fire Station Oxford, Manchester Metropolitan University’s Social Works? Live and was host of a show at Stroud Valleys Artspace 2022. In “But Is It Art?” (pictured), the public were invited to bring things for validation.
We have yet to find anything that isn’t Art.
expanded practice
THE FIRST COMMUNITY IS EARTH
Created as part of MA Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins/UAL. A response to the problems of the way “community” is used to mask conflict, exclusion, hierarchies and violence. If we start in the Earth we are at the beginning of awareness. A coming into relationship with death and life cycles.
RESidency: Tetbury woodyard
Using found materials such as brick dust and charcoal, mixed with linseed oil, I am making rituals and artworks on the timber structures including a composting loo and a roundhouse, at the Wholewoods woodyard near Tetbury. This is an ongoing residency and you can follow via my IG.
The ritual burning of unwanted art
Addressing the problem of clearing out items that are both valued AND not wanted, this is a process to be performed in a group or alone that allows us to be free of excess artworks without being hampered by guilt, anxiety or dread.
100 goddesses
Solo show in 2022 – a collection of 100 egg tempera paintings of Goddesses from around the earth-world and my own inner world. Commissions, originals and prints available.
the milky way/the waas
The Milky Way is a discovery of breastfeeding in the National Gallery London. Created with The Women’s Art Activation System as part of a commission into Social Art for EDI (SAFEDI).
Meltdown
Meltdown is a ritual melting, cutting and filing of family silver, to create a new set of items as an heirloom for my descendants.
Get in touch
- sarah@sarahdixon.studio
- Top Floor, Piccadilly Mill West, off Lower Street, Stroud GL5 2HT
Mon – Thu 10:00-17:00; Fri 10:00-13:00