Sarra Badel is a French artist born in Tunisia and now based in London, UK. She mostly works with installations made with different and new materials for each series. She works regularly with photography incorporating them in her installations. In her recent works she has been using textile and ceramic. Sarra is now a graduate from the Royal College of Art Sculpture Programme. She graduated in 2017 with an MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and she was a finalist of the Ingram Prize in 2019.
Sarra Badel
I have been looking for some time now at how female’s bodies are represented and stereotypes associated with women and their roles in western contemporary societies. I am interested as well in a more philosophical approach to that issue: the concept of touch in relation to looking. Taking these notions further it is interrogating the relationship between these two senses and open a conversation about identity and image. I would like my work to be a touching experience translated into visual. There is also the idea of seduction and revulsion at the same time. The idea of perception and false perception, fiction and reality.
This floor installation is made with a digital print of the pulp of a grapefruit on Lycra and with glazed ceramic objects. In this piece I wanted the fabric to fold and unfold meaning revealing and unrevealing. There is also a movement suggested in the folding. The fabric is treated like a liquid material. The ceramic objects are like vessels, the fabric goes inside and outside like a fluid or like thoughts. There is no end or beginning in the movement. I see a metaphor for the idea of research, a questioning never ending. The vessels introduce a rupture in the flow but at the same time starting points.