Sally Labern is a visual artist whose work combines autonomous practice, short term collaborations and durational socially engaged projects like the drawing shed. She works in sculpture and drawing, film, print and live performative works. She is deeply interested in resilience and the shadow which informs the ideas within her work; and she is a sculptor who makes/remake things. Labern also use digital tools within her personal and collaborative practice: GPS, film, sound, social networking / publishing and her work uses these media on a need to basis.

Pervading her practice is a preoccupation with the enquiry around the sovereignty of the artist’s voice, and how this translates into collaboration with other artists, and in turn how this manifests within socially engaged practice. Her work over the past ten years has explored the displaced space – the gallery versus the street versus the personal, and the emergence of an imaginative space, a preoccupation with ‘communities of imagination’ and the need to make objects and interventions that work on the edges of this impure exchange.

Labern currently holds a durational residency on two housing estates in East London Uk funded by Arts Council England where she co-leads ‘the drawing shed’, a dialogical project that unfolds around the focus of mobile art structures; a mobile drawing studio and print workshop called PrintBike and a collaborative art writing / Twitter: ‘WordintheHand’ creating live choreographed performances.

Labern creates interventions closely made with non artists, where trust and familiarity can lead to invitations to take risks in art making where the creative spaces and relationships made with participants throw up ‘edges’. It is this practice that she currently refers to as ‘lost’, making works that are driven out of that space.

When using drawing she physically works a space as well as a ‘surface’ (loosely defined, can be objects or the entirety of a papered out room/external space)and she develops large drawing/print works in contested public/’common’ spaces; she currently works on a national uk artist led Twitter project around the edges of day and night.