Sarah Beddington, b.1964
The artistic vision of Sarah Beddington has found its expression in a great variety of media and, over the years, she has produced an enormously interesting range of work. I think that one could do no better than to quote from Beddington’s own Linked-in page when trying to capture, in words, the highly distinctive quality of her output.
‘Sarah Beddington is a British artist and filmmaker based in London whose work investigates the intersection between the social, the personal and the political. Often working site specifically, her interests revolve around historical or mythological stories inserted into a contemporary context, frequently in relation to journeys and migration and the public space. Her works are usually in fragile or ephemeral media that include film and video, etched glass, silverpoint drawing and recently also performance and intervention in the public space. All of her work has a particular intensity that challenges the viewer to slow down and observe details of a minutely scrutinised world in which there can be a pervading sense of framing an absence.’
Beddington first studied at the City and Guilds of London Art School in the early 1990s. Interestingly, at that time, the Principal was Roger de Grey, a figurative artist whose work often featured landscapes wherein one can discern a fascination for evanescence and ambiguity. Perhaps it is not surprising that, even in the early 1990s, Beddington’s work was included in group exhibitions entitled, ‘Loss and Renewal’ (1994, The Honiton Arts Festival) and ‘Changing Perceptions’ (1995, London). From 1994, Beddington studied for an MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martin’s College. Here, since the mid-1960s, pioneered by film-making artist, Malcolm Le Grice, film and video have been a significant feature of the Fine Art teaching. Thus, these years must have helped Beddington to initiate what became a profound understanding of the significance of the moving images we have in our lives and our minds: our constantly-changing relationships with our past and present, with myth and reality, with our physical and imaginative environments and what all that tells us about our emotional and psychological experiences.
Given her preoccupations, it is not surprising that, over the last decade and more, Beddington has become increasingly engaged by exploring the complex communities inhabiting places where change and replacement is intrinsic. In 2014, she was responsible for an installation entitled, From here to there and on beyond.., comprising 22 etched and sandblasted windows encircling the entrance lobby of a new school in Queens, New York. Inspired by the fact that the school lies beneath the flightpaths associated with the comings and goings of the city’s airports, the windows reverberate with movement – vapour trails, birds, flying machines … evocations of real and fantastic flight, imaginative journeys.
The focus of several of her pieces has been embedded in the tragedies of real migrations and historical losses. In 2013, she contributed to an exhibition in Jericho, in the occupied West Bank of Palestine (an area of the former British-mandated territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River). Her piece comprised a procession of cloaked figures, reading from a 12th century Sufi poem describing the migration of birds. In 2015, she followed this theme further with a short film entitled, The Logic of the Birds. Set, again, in the West Bank, this is another reflection on the importance of landscapes, on loss and arrival, freedom and exile. The Jordan Valley, where the film was shot, is on one of the most important trajectories for bird migration in the world and the balletic scenes of flying birds offer very powerful images, at once real and metaphorical. In 2022, she directed a feature-length documentary, Fadia’s Tree, described as a, ‘melancholic but never melodramatic documentary (which) weaves migratory birds into the study of Palestinian refugee Fadia, whose family fled to Lebanon in 1948’[1]. The film has won various awards at festivals, including the Amnesty International Award for Best Feature at Donostia-San Sebastián Human Rights Film Festival, and was long-listed and nominated in several categories of the British Independent Film Awards in 2022.
More recently, in 2024, Beddington has been working on a film based in Cumbria, exploring the lives, histories and real and imagined threats - political, climatic, economic, cultural, physical - to hill farmers and commoners in the Lake District National Park, On Common Land.
Clearly, Sarah Beddington is an artist of substance: working in a variety of media; interweaving the visual world with history, politics, memory, myth, dream and anticipation; challenging her audiences to think deeply about themes of great significance from a range of different communities and countries. And, all of her work seems to be infused with a deep sense of visual delight, poetry, reflection, melancholy. Her work has been shown in many museums, galleries and film festivals including: City States, Liverpool Biennale; Les Rencontres Internationales, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Eastern Standards: Western Artists in China, MASS MoCA, USA; FidMarseille International Film Festival; LOOP film and video festival, Angels Gallery, Barcelona; Vanishing Point, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.
Keep an eye on Beddington’s work in the future. It will entrance and challenge us all.
© Dr. Hilary A. Taylor, 2025
[1] Danny Leigh, Financial Times, August 4th, 2022