Sarah Byrne: Homebody

9 May-26 Jun 2022

Overview

Sarah Byrne’s work references her experience of growing up in a mixed heritage family and involves a process of recalling and questioning events and narratives that have led to a separation in her two national identities. Sarah was a recipient of the Graduate Residency Award following the University of Wolverhampton MA Fine Art degree shows at the Gallery in 2019 but her residency was cut short, in March 2020, by the first national lockdown.

Two years on, Sarah will spend further time in the studio undertaking a new body of work focused on photographs taken by her late father. She will use the residency to explore, categorise and respond to her father’s images of holidays around Europe and his childhood home. Recently unearthed, the photographs give insight into a life before the artist was born. For the first time, Sarah will introduce crochet and weaving to the centre of her practice and experiment with dyeing and spinning yarn in colourways that recur in her father’s images.

The residency title, Homebody, is both a reference to the artist’s father, who always worked from home and was comforted by the familiar and familial, and to the restorative comfort that Sarah seeks through the work.