Sara Davies
'Stay this moment'
I am a Swedish immigrant who has spent half her life in the UK and feels both British and Swedish but is neither or both. My work explore the experience of being Anglo-Nordic in the north of England through photographic self-staging. I investigate how migrants in diaspora establish a sense of belonging through imaginary re-visitation of the ancestral home relying on symbolic imagery and collective myths. I am using the photograph as a space to explore identity as continually reforming through the relation between self and others, where identity is multiple and fluid rather then fixed and pre-determined by the idea of nation. I am a migrant in diaspora re-inscribing memory of paintings. In this piece of artwork I am, through performative photography, transforming Nordic national romantic imagery from the turn of the last century. I am responding to the little red croft, the pine forest and the traditional costume, in the Nordic countries symbols synonymous with the idea of an ideal home.
