Dr Sarah Wishart Lanarkshire, United Kingdom

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I am a film maker, writer, and artist based in Glasgow’s Southside. I have a PhD in how the documentation of live art might include the memories of audiences and collaborative practice is a key component in much of my work.

A writer, film maker and visual artist. I studied performance and live art at Roehampton, Queen Mary’s and Leeds Universities and completed my PhD on “A Provenance of Performance: Excavating new art histories through a consideration of re-enactment and the perspectives of the audience” in 2018. I have been working collaboratively with Nicholas Middleton on a walkingroad-movie for the last nine years and in 2019 was a writer for a feature length collaborative film with Forest Fringe that premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2022. In 2021 in the middle of the pandemic I relocated to Scotland and was commissioned almost immediately by the Royal Conservatoire Scotland to create both a piece of sound art and a project engaging young people with process. I am fascinated by how artists, writers and performers work – unpacking and repacking the processes of artistic and creative practice is at the heart of much of my work. In the first iteration for Undertow – a collective of artists including Middleton and Tana West, I considered how processes and practices of encouragement help us to make work when we are getting over anxiety, depression or trauma.

My practice is embedded in unpacking and exploring the structuring of process; where inspiration begins, where restriction takes over, what leads an artist through the first idea to end construction. This has come from a background in live art and in researching, engaging in and teaching processes of devising performance. Influenced by involvement with organisations who prioritise the investigation and support of the development of live art artists like the Live Art Development Agency my recent commission for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland looked at helping students ‘get out of stuck’ by creating their own archives to go exploring in. I am currently working with textiles, film, sound and text to tell stories that are slightly out of joint, hidden or lost under the surface of things. These are stories built out of the moments of advice artists and writers give to themselves or their audiences and in translating the modes of delivery. For example, shifting advice from Virginia Woolf to herself as a writer from her diaries into a wallpaper for writers, or autonomous training videos.