Our People

sking@aup.ac.uk

Sarah King

Senior Lecturer & Course Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art

Sarah King is an artist, educator and researcher, and Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art at Arts University Plymouth. Her practice explores relationships between memory, materials and place, with particular attention to care, repair, loss and the more-than-human. Drawing on folklore, ritual and the uncanny, she considers how objects carry traces of lives and landscapes, and how making can become a way of attending to fragile or overlooked things. Sarah works across sculpture, assemblage, textiles, drawing, photography, and performance. Her processes include walking, gathering, observing, wrapping, stitching and arranging. Often working with organic and salvaged materials, she creates objects that suggest relics, domestic forms or speculative tools. These works bring material memory into conversation with imagined possibilities for tending to and mending the impossible. Sustained engagement with place is central to Sarah’s research. Repeated visits to coastal landscapes inform her exploration of memory, folklore, thresholds and more-than-human relationships. Walking, gathering and close observation shape her material processes. Her assemblages consider what materials retain and how they might invite acts of care. Her research project The Lost Object developed through gathering, caring for and transforming materials, exploring their relationship to absence, vulnerability and loss. The project has been shared through exhibitions and performance-lectures, including presentations at Richmond Art Gallery and the Annual Art History Conference at the University of York. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has work held in private collections in the UK and US. Sarah co-convenes Arts University Plymouth’s Memory, Site & Artefact Research Group and is a member of LAND2. She leads the Fine Art degree and teaches across year1 and year3 and contributes to MA teaching, supporting students to develop connections between experimentation, critical enquiry and their individual practices. Her teaching centres on the studio as a place for making, sharing, questioning and learning through dialogue. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and External Examiner for Glasgow School of Art.

Research Interests

Research Outcomes

Research Projects 2026 - present - At the Edge of This World Place-based research exploring coastal landscapes, memory, materiality and enchantment through a distance residency associated with StudioKIND. Walking, gathering, repeated visits and site-responsive making inform independent practice. 2025 - present - Soft Practices: Enchanted Vulnerabilities through Ritual, Fragility, and the Esoteric Body Practice-led research investigating vulnerability, memory and healing through ritual, material repair, symbolic gesture and embodied experience. The project develops interests in care, fragility and the esoteric. 2021 - 2025 - The Lost Object Practice-led research exploring abjection, memory and material transformation through cyclical acts of gathering, caring and repairing. The project considers how rituals of care and remembrance respond to fragility, loss and the attempt to mend what seems irreparable. Selected Research Outputs Conference papers and performance-lectures <ul><li dir="ltr">2026 - Soft Practice, Material Memory, Fragility and Speculative Futures. Paper presented at the 9th Memory, Forgetting and Creating International Interdisciplinary Conference.</li><li dir="ltr">2025 - Walking Between Worlds. Performance-lecture with Professor Judith Noble, Annual Art History Conference, University of York.</li><li dir="ltr">2025 - Recollecting, Remembering, Regaining: The Lost Object Project. Paper presented at the 8th Memory, Forgetting and Creating International Interdisciplinary Conference.</li></ul> Exhibitions <ul><li dir="ltr">2026 She Sees Herself, joint exhibition with Professor Judith Noble, Field System, Ashburton.</li><li dir="ltr">2026 Totems for Troubling Times, GROW, Plymouth.</li><li dir="ltr">2025 Traces, Ruptures, Returns, MIRROR, Arts University Plymouth.</li><li dir="ltr">2025 Studio KIND Summer Exhibition, North Devon.</li><li dir="ltr">2024 Textile Open 2024, No Format Gallery, Deptford, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2024 PILOT, Project Space 1, Arts University Plymouth.</li><li dir="ltr">2023 PUNCHCARD, The Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough.</li><li dir="ltr">2023 COLLECTING & REASSEMBLING, Richmond Art Gallery, Canada.</li><li dir="ltr">2023 Drawing Open 2023, No Format Gallery, Deptford, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 Nanjing Expo, Nanjing, China.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 The Time Capsule Project, Brooklyn Art Library, New York.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 BAS9 Fringe Exhibition.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 The Book Project, TEBBS Gallery, online.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 Print Exchange, Winthrop University, South Carolina, USA.</li><li dir="ltr">2022 SFSA Drawing Open, No Format Gallery, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2021 Cities, touring exhibition, Brooklyn, Portland, Seattle and Boulder, USA.</li><li dir="ltr">2020 Print Exchange, Alfred University, New York.</li><li dir="ltr">2019 The Other Art Fair, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2019 The Slow Galerie, Paris.</li><li dir="ltr">2019 Hidden, Fringe Arts Bath.</li><li dir="ltr">2019 Tiny Sketchbook Show, Brooklyn Art Library, New York.</li><li dir="ltr">2018 Royal West of England Academy Annual Open, Bristol.</li><li dir="ltr">2017 A Drawing Show, PS1, Plymouth College of Art.</li><li dir="ltr">2017 Test Space, Spike Island, Bristol.</li><li dir="ltr">2012 Specular, KARST, Plymouth.</li><li dir="ltr">2012 my sister life, Artspace 101, Plymouth University.</li><li dir="ltr">2012 TRACE, Motorcade/FlashParade, Bristol.</li><li dir="ltr">2012 Surface II, Crypt Gallery, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2011 Surface, Crypt Gallery, London.</li><li dir="ltr">2011 Satori, performance/drawing, SPACE, Dartington.</li><li dir="ltr">2011 Goldener Saal, Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin.</li><li dir="ltr">2011 Ultimate Stillness, online exhibition.</li><li dir="ltr">2010 The Moment of Privacy Has Passed, Usher Gallery, Lincoln.</li><li dir="ltr">2010 Domesticated, touring exhibition, Postmodern Gallery, Swindon.</li><li dir="ltr">2009 Domesticated, touring exhibition, Walcot Chapel, Bath.</li></ul>