Sarah Bennett
Bennett is a UK based artist with over 40 year’s teaching and academic leadership experience in Fine Art, most recently at Kingston School of Art, London, where she was Head of the School of Art and Architecture 2016-2021. In 2018 Bennett joined EQ-Arts, NL, as a Board Member and has since chaired multiple enhancement and accreditation panels for EQ-Arts and national quality assurance agencies in art schools across Europe, most recently at KABK in Den Haag, Netherlands and TSAA, Tbilisi, Georgia. She has contributed to a number of interdisciplinary and international educational research projects, such as the EU funded CALOHEX tuning project 2020-2024, and her papers relating to contemporary art practice and archives have been presented in international conferences and publications. Bennett has supervised artistic research doctorates since 2010. She has exhibited frequently in Italy and the UK.
Practice statement
Bennett’s artistic research traverse fine art practice, archival studies, cultural geography, architecture, and museology, and she employs a range of artistic research methods and material processes including digital recording and projection; facsimile object making; observational drawing; and embodied actions. Through these she aims 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 her methods of making and installing work, she endeavors to imbue the artwork with an affective 'charge' that, when cognition takes over, may elicit critical, interpretative and associative responses on the part of the audience.
Recent artistic research projects have centered on historical and contemporary institutional archives, with specific focus on nineteenth-century psychiatry: Safe-keeping (custodia) and the Museo Laboratorio della Mente, Rome, and at the Museo Manicomio di San Servolo, Venice; and 'Bummock: the Tennyson Research Centre' at The Collection, Lincoln, UK – documented in Bennett, S. Bracey, A. Maier, D. (2023) ‘Controlled Rummage Approaches for Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre’ Journal of Artistic Research, Society of Artistic Research. Bennett’s PhD was completed at Plymouth University in 2010 and disclosed new understandings of the workings of a former asylum that was redeveloped as exclusive housing.
Other links:
instagram: @studiosarahbennett
instagram: @vitrinestudiosarahbennett2