Home

HOME
A collaborative project by Sarah Basha and Jessica Longmore
As part of Art Territory Exchange Online Residency 2020 - 2022

The following text introduces both artists and their connection to each other. Their union came at a time of immense turmoil, both personally and globally. The work they produced was essentially built around a series of conversations - zoom calls and WhatsApp messages - which fitted around childrens' bedtimes, homeschooling and paid work. These conversations were moments of sanctuary in an unfamiliar world. The works produced were photographic, instructional and timebase - restless in their nature and rarely finding a traditional, physical form. This dialogue and process of art making has informed much of the work Jessica produced since and both artists continue to converse and reflect on this uniquely isolated period of time and the connection that was created between them.

Sarah Basha is an artist and mentor, using metaphor and myth to illuminate the shadow side
of our psyche. Sarah’s art explores the themes of Identity and our relationship to Time and
Space using primarily photography, words, fibre and collage, and is marked by its constant
duality both in its form and substance; a constant conversation between materials, between
the past and the present, between herself and the other. 

In 2015, when she lost her father to Alzheimers and became a mother, she had the
existential urge to reconnect with her Art and transmute her individual experience into art. In
2018, Sarah ditched the digital design consultancy job and completed an 8 month artist
residency at the Artist Residency in Motherhood which heralded the beginning of her journey
as an emerging conceptual artist.

Jessica Longmore is an artist and Fine Art lecturer based in Manchester, UK.  Her practice
involves sculptural interventions which explore thresholds; often occupying uneasy spaces. 
Jessica’s practice is sculptural in its origins, concerned with forms occupying space, but is
often represented by a photographic image, encapsulating specific locations and moments in
time.

As a product of two distinct and at times oppositional cultures, (Jamaican and English),
Jessica often finds herself on the margins – somewhere between neither and both. This
precarious position informs much of her practice and encourages her to question the
boundaries between states of being and the ownership of space.  

Sarah and Jessica are currently carrying out the collaborative Art Territory Exchange
Residency based in Mafra, Portugal and Manchester, UK exploring notions of Home. They
had ironically picked this theme before Covid19 hit the world and brought them into
lockdown. The unexpected circumstances forced them to think of Home in micro terms, and
use the mundane as inspiration, and the materials on hand as their medium. Over the
course of this year and a half they have created a sensorial experience of the intimate
landscapes of their home - both past and present, utopic and real, individual and shared.

As part of the touring exhibition 'Unboxing', Jessica and Sarah presented a series of postcards
which invite the audience to reflect on their own experience of home. This series of
illustrated questions is part of a wider body of ongoing work between the two artists.