Sadie Hennessy at The Margate School

We're looking forward to welcoming Sadie Hennessy onto the Visual Communication course this week. Sadie will be running a workshop called 'Goddess' with students as part of the Image module where they will experiment with props, costume and make-up in the photography studio.

Sadie Hennessy is a multi-disciplinary artist whose roots lie in collage.

"I have expanded my idea of collage to encompass the third and fourth dimensions, to create immersive environments and events, examining the zeitgeist, and the world around me. I am increasingly interested in working in non-gallery spaces on site-specific projects." Sadie has more recently introduced video, song, audio and neon into her work, alongside the collage and assemblage, to further push the boundaries of her ideas.

"I have also started to introduce performative elements into my practice, using my own body, and autobiographical stories, to function as metaphors for universal topics. All this is done through a dark prism of melancholia, mixed with a sense of humour, that definitely comes from the blacker end of the comedy spectrum. My work is always made with public engagement in mind, and an awareness of an audience is important to me. I want to create ephemeral, memorable experiences that live on in people’s minds."

Sadie is currently interested in the tension between the natural and the man-made world and to that end she recently created a beauty parlour, with neon signage, in a horsebox on a cliff-top in Dorset called Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty (Portland, Dorset, Sept. 2021). For the last few years she has been focused on creating post-apocalyptic imagery, and events, inspired by vintage sci-fi and the lived realities of existing in the Anthropocene epoch.

Learn more about the Visual Communication course; Design, Society, Nature here. Applications are currently open for the next academic year (2022/23).

All images c/o Sadie Hennessy