Biography

Sarah Misselbrook (born in Southampton, UK, in 1977) is a visual artist working across performance, video, sound, photography, drawing and sculptural installation. She has lived and worked off-grid in rural Catalunya, Spain, since 2012. Her practice explores the relationships between body, landscape and material, drawing on embodied actions, incidental materials and the changing environment in which she lives and works.

Misselbrook graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 2000. She subsequently gained a qualification in disordered psychology and a PGCE from the University of Southampton in 2004, before completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Cyprus College of Art in 2007. In 2011, she received an MFA in Fine Art with Distinction from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Her early work examined the female body as a site of social expectation, consumption and control. Using materials including chocolate, soap, latex and plaster, she explored the tension between perfection and imperfection, vulnerability and strength, and the seductive and repellent qualities of the body. Works such as Followed, Monthly, Pure and 1m² established an approach combining sculpture, performance and video, while her 2006 solo exhibition for ‘a space’ at Bargate Monument Gallery, Southampton, developed these concerns through installation and moving image.

Alongside her studio practice, Misselbrook has worked extensively in education, community arts and collaborative projects. Her professional experience includes teaching Art and Design, facilitating workshops for people with physical disabilities, and working with a space arts organisation in Southampton. She has received funding from Arts Council England and a Leonardo da Vinci Grant, and has undertaken commissions and exhibitions in the UK, Cyprus, South Korea and Spain. In 2014, she created a large-scale installation and community performance at NLCS Jeju, South Korea, responding to the volcanic landscape and traditions of calligraphy. From its conception in 2016, she has contributed to Riu d’Art, an open-air art project in rural Catalunya.

Since moving to the Ebro valley, Misselbrook’s practice has become increasingly shaped by direct encounters with the landscape and its material traces. Her work responds to fire, drought, flooding and environmental change, using materials gathered or produced through her surroundings, including soil, ash, charcoal made from olive prunings and burned fig, plaster impressions of leaves, and found objects.

In 2019, following the devastating forest fires in the Ribera d’Ebre, she created Inside the Forest as part of Cendrart, an initiative using art to respond to the burned landscape. Combining plaster impressions of fig leaves, found materials and live performance, the work explored loss, fragility and the possibility of regeneration. Her subsequent video work Outside, Inside the Forest (2019) continued this investigation of the relationship between body and landscape. In 2026, the work received Labea’s Materia Bosque Award and was screened at festivals including Dansàneu in the Catalan Pyrenees.

In 2020–2021, Misselbrook produced Upon Reflection, an artist’s book presenting 25 years of artistic practice. Her work has since continued to develop through drawing, performance, moving image and sound. The Resilient drawings (2023), made with handmade charcoal including carbon from burned fig, respond to drought and the resilience of the fig tree. Related performance work was presented in the context of Cultura Verda at Mèdol, Tarragona. Other projects and presentations have included Ermita 2.0, Territori Festival in Ibiza, the DAR (Dones Artistes Rurals) network supporting rural women artists in the Terres de l’Ebre, and Natura i Art in Els Ports in 2024. That year, she also presented Alminal, a collaborative performance at Lo Pati as part of the Femme in Arts festival, and premiered Descent through Cultura Verda’s Green Screen at Mèdol. For Fem Safareig in 2025, a project curated by Centre d’Estudis de les Terres de l’Ebre, Misselbrook presented a live performance in the old washhouse (El Lavadero) in Riba-roja d’Ebre, entitiled ‘Comunal’.

In 2026, Misselbrook presented We, the Tree, a site-specific performance for Eufònic Terra in an olive grove in La Sénia, exploring the body, gesture and material transformation. She also presented Vestiges: tras el fuego as part of Reviscolar in Pena-roja de Tastavins, responding to forest fire through charcoal, ash, sound and spoken word. Both projects continue her investigation into the relationships between the body, landscape, memory and regeneration.

Working from her off-grid studio at La Vall, Misselbrook also hosts creative workshops and collaborative projects with students, graduates and artists. Her practice remains an evolving process of observation, collection and transformation, questioning what it means to make, document and preserve work within a landscape that is itself continually changing.

Artist Statement:

‘I investigate being in, and of a female body, focusing on identity, feminism, strength, power and weakness. The political, social and cultural systems that impose limits on this body with their prescriptions and borders have given way to its connection with the natural world, trees, insects, bones, skulls and rocks. I am an isolated body in a large-scale natural environment, yearning for connection with an audience and questioning whether what I do here is, in fact, heard or seen. With ongoing research into religious and submissive acts within my practice, coming from Catholic education, I play with binary opposites; control and chaos, light and dark, life and death. I am inspired by nature’s ability to overcome itself, the effect of flooding on the ground and the fig tree, with its ability to survive fire and drought. I use natural and found materials; leaves, rocks, charcoal, earth, always questioning the sustainability of creative practice. Through the use of chocolate, soap, latex, wax, degradable or even edible materials, I attempt to present my obsession with the seductive and repellent nature of human anatomy.

As a starting point, I produce monochrome drawings using handmade charcoal from olive wood pruning. I create large scale and site specific installations, using plaster prints of leaves and body parts. Plaster, clinical and white, is juxtaposed against ruined or stained sets of chaotic natural spaces; forest fire sites and cracked and dry soils. Plaster casts break uncontrollably, or are sometimes intentionally destroyed, presenting themselves as part of the creation process, questioning success and failure and reflecting natural chaos. My drawings form a kind of legacy to the lifeless objects that I collect. These drawings are burned to create ash, which is used to make my own paint or to rot my human waste. This space where I work lends itself to live and recorded performance, experimenting with my voice and its echo in the valley. Actions within the build process are recorded; obsessive collecting, tidying, cleaning, burning, drawing, all become part of a performance for the camera. In an attempt to control my surroundings or to make sense of everything, the creative process offers surprising results and connections.’