Bouncing Between Things
by Francesca Gavin, November 2025 (published in By the time you finish your tea... it will be dead!)

Inventing a new visual language isn’t easy. To form a conversation, experiment with the dissemination of ideas, and convey feeling is something every artist strives to do. In Sara Graça’s case, that syntax has developed naturally and haphazardly through the juxtaposition of object, drawing, photography, and moving image. The Portuguese artist based in London creates a dialogue between her works across exhibitions, web platforms, and spaces that feel
innately her own. It is arguable that Graça has a Tumblr or blog-like aesthetic – those now almost dated web platforms for uploading imagery. She has many different accounts. What makes it an unusual platform today is how users can rewrite the HTML code of their pages and transform the outcome. There is something customisable and experimental to it – a collage-like approach that emerges in her online archives, but also in the way she works with space in an exhibition context. Her fixation is not on the fineness of the result or the process. Her work is more about how images or the juxtaposition of objects can embody a concept –how meaning can develop and bounce between things in some kind of way, and how the combination of things leaves the viewer very open to interpretation. Her work is intentionally anti-perfectionist.

Graça’s work draws heavily on the experience of her daily existence. The things she sees, the places she has lived, the people she knows, the artists and ideas she researches. There is an element of autobiography and discovery in following the artist as she wanders through life and lets experience filter into her practice. Yet the work is not limited to the personal; it is more a reflection of the now. Graça’s objects of inspiration act as catalysts for concepts. The items in her work are recurrently found and repurposed – a reaction to material.

The concept of home is an ongoing motif – in particular, an awareness of the precarity of urban housing and the fragility of urban space in the wake of gentrification. It’s something she has experience both in Portugal and while living in London. At one point, she used her home as a temporary project space. How this subject manifests, however, is unstable. Collages using pages of Ikea catalogues captioned as “sweetie, don’t be sad...”. A ceramic replica of a supersized Lego brick she found in a supermarket. Ramp-shaped structures built out of construction waste. Her exhibitions feel expanded and installation-like. Floors, carpets, and walls are all things she takes into consideration. Music is also an ongoing influence in the development of Graça’s practice. She began making work in collaboration with musicians – notably making video and VJing for gigs by her friends Pega Monstro and the
scene around them. That DIY approach to creation fed into how she began making art: a creative process conscious of audience, unrestricted imagery, and the personal. A visual practice reflecting an approach of making music itself – a certain confidence in the unresolved.

Graça’s videos, meanwhile, were created by collaging and layering images using Premiere Pro software. At one point, she exhibited video collations on iPads embedded into folders that could be passed around in a social environment. Social interactions have, at times, become the work. In 2021, she transformed a project space into a meeting point where she would welcome people and drive them to the beach. More recently, she made painterly photographs of the contents of her handbag – a literal portrait of the things we carry with us. There is a sense of stage set in her exhibitions, notably those focused on the sculptural. She exhibited four- meter-long rats constructed from bleached, folded mountboard, overseen by cat images with their eyes cut out. A narrative made into space. Yet we are strongly aware that we are looking at representation, not the real thing. Holes are an ongoing motif – things
that break the surface of the artwork, connecting and merging the dimensions of ideas and reality. Cutting a hole breaks the illusion of artistic experience.

Her works touch on both flatness and volume – standing 3D objects that are made from 2D materials. In some way, she addresses the idea of the body in an expanded form, occupying space – at times a tribute to feminist history. Her image-based works depict the body, yet often it is fragmented. It is rare that we see a whole human figure. A video of people catching other people falling back projected onto hanging fabric. UV prints of feet in striped stockings. All of these touch on the fundamental ideas of sculpture as a way to consider the object in relationship to the human body in space.
A series of handmade, hanging beaded curtain sculptures reference text and image-making as much as the body. The list of materials in these pieces is
notable – incorporating a plethora of stuff, including found post-it note, a passport photo, two currencies, an SD card, a card holder, glass beads, price tags, key chains, and magazine cutouts. There is something bodily about these textile and object pieces. They are human-sized, accumulative – like the object of life synthesized into a flatter form.

Yet despite this awareness of surface and structure, Graça’s work increasingly seems to grasp at how to depict emotional inner life. To question what does feeling look like? The depiction of something ungraspable. The experience of sleep, of music, of home, of humour, of psychological boundaries, of physical limits. A practice that tries to grasp what it is to be human.