Sarah Spanton

Artist statement

Concepts
Spanton's practice is cross-disciplinary. Based in Leeds , her work embraces performance, video, photography, dance, sculpture and text. Her solo and collaborative projects are seen in a range of different contexts: such as, movement-led works in a live art setting, site-specific dance installations, performative photography and performance to camera video works.

Solo projects address themes of identity, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and the body. Intimate and often humorous, this work explores emotions, inner worlds and states of mind, frequently driven by autobiographical starting points. Collaborative works are often site or context specific, central concerns include space, process and composition.

Conceptually, many works have explored apparent binary states such as public/private Bridge (2007), Emerge (2000), masculine/feminine 7 Lashes (1994), Tomboy (2001), Heterosexual/Homosexual Homeward Bound (1997), physical/psychological (interior/exterior) Homoeostasis: Fight or Flight (1999). These investigations aim to create a sense of constantly shifting between states of not being fixed and of straddling divides.

Spanton makes evocative works that resonate and engage, allowing viewers to bring their own perspectives to the project. She flirts with audiences, preferring seduction to confrontation, subtly drawing the viewer in.

A multiplicity of meanings emerge from this intensely mobile, intertextual performance.
From Valerie Briginshaw's Dance, Space and Subjectivity, published by Palgrave, Macmillan 2001.

Influences
Each meticulous, deliberate movement suggests tight choreography, but as each ending delivers a unique end-sculpture, there is clearly much improvisation, masquerading as design.Here, the vessels of Eva Hesse meet the spatial string diameters of Fred Sandback.Early feminist figuration that re-used fairytale figuration collides with a rigorous minimalist aesthetic. From Cherry Smyth's Catalogue Essay for Princess: Clock Ticking 2006.

Career Path
Spanton trained initially as a sculptor, making small hand-held mixed media objects, graduating from Sheffield City Polytechnic in 1989. She completed an MA in Dance Theory; representation and somatics at De Montfort University in 2000, looking at issues of sexuality, gender and feminism, relating her cross-disciplinary practice to both feminist and dance theory. Her professional practice is undertaken alongside working freelance as a project manager, developer, consultant and evaluator in the participatory arts sector.

She is also the Development Director of New Work Yorkshire, an organisation providing stimulus, professional development opportunities, visibility, support and signposting for all those who make up the live art/new work sector in the Yorkshire region.