Sarah explores themes of identity and loss. Drawing upon memories of her own altered state of consciousness and disassociation, she uses her work as a place to hide, challenge her existence and appease her past. Using photographs as a starting point, Sarah works using memory, imbuing her work with a sense of unease and detachment. She is interested in the interplay between humans and landscape, their boundaries, erosion, renewal, suffocation and rebirth. Discarded buildings, decay and abandoned construction. Waste ground containing the footprints of demolished buildings, themes of scarring and ghosts. Negative spaces, cracks, creases, shadows. Absence and disappearance. Sarah investigates her relationship with landscape, linking her own personal migration to the abandonment of the past. Her sense of rootlessness and disconnection is examined within the decay and neglect of her current location, the process of which alters her own internal landscape, shifting her consciousness and her connection with the present.
Sarah is a member of the Place and Memory Project, Leeds.
sarahdeakinart 
Dear Sarah
I would like to introduce myself and to raise the possibility of working with, or supporting you.
I worked for many years in public sector management and development and am now comfortably retired. So I am in the privileged position of being able to follow my passion and study art. I am on the Access to Higher Education course at Leeds College of Art and will be applying for the College’s new MA in Creative Practice in September. I am also busy getting myself networked- have enrolled on Leeds Creative Timebank, signed up with Leeds Arts and Minds, and become a member of East Street Arts.
I am interested in supporting/collaborating with you, so what can I offer?
• In terms of my art practice I can draw, paint, and take photographs (both film and digital).
• I have access to college facilities: photography equipment, studios and darkrooms; print, ceramic, glass, plaster and other 3D workshops; and library and IT resources.
• I have experience of working with people as a facilitator, network support, relationship-building and ‘conversations that matter’ (trained and practiced in Art of Hosting methodology http://www.artofhosting.org/).
Increasingly I am working in a multi-media, interdisciplinary way, using maps, fabric and other found materials to layer meaning into/onto visual images. Last year for our end of year show I did an autobiographical piece including a large print of a charcoal drawing of my Mum (head and shoulders), together with an enlarged (1913) map of the area where we both grew up, and an edited sound recording of a conversation between me and my Mum about the map.
I am continuing to explore the rich emotional, historical, psychological, philosophical and spiritual relationship between place, landscape (including urban) and the stories we hold in memory. I am seeking new ways to express these connections in a range of visual ‘languages’, including perhaps by working with people and their individual and shared experiences. This is the focus for my final project, which I hope will develop into a research proposal for the MA. My research in this area led me to your work, which I really like.
Perhaps the best way forward would be a conversation with you about your work and how I might be able help or learn from it. Please e-mail me or ring me on the number below.
Thanks
Lesley
07704452862