Sarah Hardacre

In both her personal and public practice, Hardacre is a visual archivist and historian, immersed in trawling images in public archives to reveal hidden narratives. Her collage and print works explore the experience of women within the urban built environment and the complex relationship between female bodies, architecture and space. Hers is a practice that investigates how collage can function as a feminist spatial method; disrupting architectural authority by re-fragmenting the relationship between the female body and the built environment, concerned with the tensions between visibility and containment across domestic and urban scales, interrogating spatial power through material disruption.

Her visual arts practice is now moving into ceramics, alongside continuing collage and screen print. Where the collage extends outward into the built environment, the ceramics turn the same questions inward: from external and domestic architecture to internal domestic objects, from the building to what happens inside it. What ceramics offer that collage does not is the object itself: the plate, the vessel, the domestic surface, things made by women, used by women, cleaned by women, and largely unseen. They open onto different ground; the feminist histories of invisible labour, the Wages for Housework movement, and the domestic interior as a site of unseen work. The medium changes what the work can do. Clay is heavier, physical, slower, more labour intensive; hand-building and throwing open up a sculptural register that collage cannot reach, and the making itself becomes part of what the work interrogates. The work is also autobiographical: she has worked in chippies and currently drives HGVs alongside her practice, grafting to sustain the creative life. The new pieces emerging from the studio are born out of the very structures the work investigates.

Sarah's work is exhibited internationally and featured in a major retrospective of 400 years of Women Artists at Sotheby's, London, in 2023. Her work is held in public and private collections worldwide, including the British Museum and Damien Hirst's MurderMe collection.

Her public commissions extend to co-curated performances, community driven projects and large scale installations which investigate the sociohistorical stories of place. Working as a cultural producer, she builds research led projects from the ground up, establishing relationships across communities and surfacing hidden local histories, particularly those of women. As Executive Producer of TRANSMISSION (2026), a festival of dance for Tameside, she conceived and delivered a programme that brought traditional folk and Morris dance into collaboration with contemporary street dance, exploring living heritage and the changing identity of place. Reclaiming The Past, part of BarrowFull's PAST DREAMS project (2024), was a community driven research and engagement project uncovering the histories of Barrovian women's lives, culminating in a public parade and a legacy of artworks, performance and research that continues to be used across the borough.