Sarah Bennett

United Kingdom
research interests: archives, artistic research, site responsive practices, Fine Arts, affect, Higher education in the Arts
affiliation: EQ-Arts, NL, Transart Institute, and, Kingston School of Art, London
en

My artistic research traverses fine art practice, cultural geography, historic buildings, visual anthropology and museology. I employ a range of artistic research methods and material processes including: digital recording and projection; facsimile object making; observational drawing; and embodied actions. Through these I aim to reveal how diverse institutional systems operate, and to question the level of complicity society affords such systems, i.e. how we are implicated in their continuance. At the same time, in my methods of making and installing work, I endeavour to imbue the artwork with an affective 'charge' that may elicit critical, interpretative and associative responses on the part of the audience. Recent artistic research projects have centred on historical and contemporary institutional archives, with specific focus on nineteenth-century psychiatry. My PhD was completed at Plymouth University in 2010 and disclosed new understandings of the workings of a former asylum, now redeveloped as exclusive housing, through stopframe animation,.

 

research

research expositions

  • Controlled Rummage Approaches for Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre (2024) author(s): Sarah Bennett, Andrew Bracey, Danica Maier published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    'Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre' is an artistic research project involving three artistic researchers: Andrew Bracey, Danica Maier and Sarah Bennett. A bummock is the unseen — submerged — part of an iceberg, and comprises the largest volume of ice, compared with the tip — which is visible above the surface of the water. Likewise, archives hold more items than are commonly viewed or accessed. In Bummock, we choose to bypass the catalogue to engage with materials directly, establishing a 'controlled rummage' method as an alternative approach to standard archive access practice. This iteration of the Bummock project explores, examines, and creates new artistic research from five years of working with the Tennyson Research Centre (TRC), Lincoln, UK. This exposition has been collaboratively authored by the three artistic researchers and is structured into two sections. The first, labelled the 'controlled section', serves to introduce the project and its core concerns. The second, referred to as the 'rummage section', provides visitors with the opportunity to navigate their own path through the archival objects from the TRC and the artworks created. Within this section, individual reflections and critical discussions on three themes are presented: our past experiences working with archives, the research journey of the project, and potential future directions stemming from our research. The exposition concludes with a collective summary of findings and a film documenting the project. The contribution of this exposition is twofold: first, to unveil and disseminate the artistic research associated with the project, and second, to identify the key benefits that artists can bring to the archive by employing the 'controlled rummage' approach. The intention is to establish a framework that facilitates future use by other archive users. Download Accessible PDF
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