Sarah Francis Art
Support, Repair and Material Dependency
Sarah Francis is a Welsh artist based in Leeds working across sculpture, installation and photography.
Using timber, found materials, photographic processes and constructed forms, she creates sculptures that examine support, dependency, containment and repair between bodies, objects and environments. Her work focuses on moments of negotiation, where something is held together, modified, maintained or pushed beyond its intended use.
Questions of care, consent, agency and vulnerability run throughout the practice. Francis is drawn to the tension between protection and restriction, stability and collapse, and the ways physical structures can mirror emotional and social relationships. Rather than illustrating these ideas, she builds situations where they can be encountered through material, scale, proximity and spatial relationships.
Working with processes of accumulation, reconstruction and adaptation, she creates forms that sit between the bodily and architectural. Existing materials are cut, combined, repaired and reconfigured, carrying traces of previous functions while taking on new roles and meanings.
Recent research through Leeds Creative Labs in partnership with Yorkshire Sculpture Park introduced ideas of clot formation, pressure, rupture and repair, providing new ways to think about long standing concerns around support, containment and instability.
Through sculpture, installation and photography, Francis considers what happens when systems of support come under pressure, how acts of repair reveal both fragility and resilience, and how relationships of care, dependency and connection are continually negotiated.
In 2023 Francis made her US debut at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, exhibiting alongside Catherine Opie, Jenna Gribbon and Nicole Eisenman. Her work is held in public and private collections in the UK and United States.
