Sarah Francis Art
Support, Repair and Material Dependency
Sarah Francis is a Welsh artist based in Leeds working across sculpture, installation and photography.
Her practice explores how support, care and connection are built, maintained and tested. Through timber, found materials, assemblage and photographic processes, she creates structures that examine relationships between bodies, objects and environments, revealing the often hidden systems that hold things together.
Questions of consent, agency, dependency and repair run throughout her work. Recent projects have focused on support as a material and structural condition, exploring how adaptation, maintenance and survival can become embedded within a form rather than simply represented by it. Working with processes of accumulation, reconstruction and transformation, her sculptures often occupy a space between the bodily and architectural, appearing simultaneously vulnerable, resilient and uncertain.
Drawing from lived experience, Francis is interested in the relationship between bodies, memory, landscape and belonging. Themes of intimacy, grief, pleasure and care continue to shape her practice, creating work that asks how we support one another and what becomes visible when those structures begin to fail.
Recent research developed through Leeds Creative Labs in partnership with Yorkshire Sculpture Park has expanded her interest in repair, material systems and biological processes, providing a new framework through which to explore long-standing concerns around support, containment and survival.
In 2023 Francis made her US debut at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York, exhibiting alongside artists including Catherine Opie, Jenna Gribbon and Nicole Eisenman. Her work is held in public and private collections in the UK and United States.
