Artist Statement

Sarah Dawn King (b.1976), is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of photography and movement. Her work centers around her continuous inquiry into the roles of embodiment and physicality in creative agency, and the creation of empathy and bodily affect. Fueled by the experiential aspects of making photographs, she integrates her background as a dancer in order to focus on the physicality of this process. By working experimentally, emphasizing bodily intuition and improvisation, the continual transformation of the work becomes a record of ephemeral experience and physical acts.  Embedded in this process is the emergence and empowerment of the feminine self. The body becomes a source of identity, communication and power.

Imminent Proximity is the first series in her ongoing work, The Proximity Project: a long term photographic and performative work that illuminates the intimate experiences of being human. During improvised field practices, physical proximity in the natural environment and spontaneous expression reveal the essence of our humanity. The body becomes a catalyst for emotive power, and a place from which to perform and cultivate empathy.

Through her abstract work, Sarah seeks to visualize the sensory experience while unveiling continuously changing relationships between body, space, time and materiality. Each work is made in reaction to various experiential states. They are made over short periods of time and exist in isolation from one another. The diversity of the work emphasizes the eccentricity, fluctuation and impermanence of the felt experience.

Sarah’s work has been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions throughout WA, including Golden Hour and Reverberations (PCNW, 2022), Interconnection: finding connection in our siloed times (Columbia City Gallery, 2022), Collective Visions 2022 juried exhibition (Collective Visions Gallery, 2022) and Certificate in Fine Art Photography Thesis Exhibition (PCNW, 2019). In 2022, she was a guest lecturer at The Besant School, in Ojai, CA, and she presented her series Imminent Proximity for the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s lecture series: Untold Stories: Matters of Life and Death. She has been a guest artist at Inscape Arts (Seattle, 2018) and created work for the Shunpike Storefronts Program (Seattle, 2020). Sarah holds a Certificate in Fine Art Photography from the Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW, 2019).Sarah is on the faculty at the Bainbridge Dance Center on Bainbridge Island, WA, where she also serves on the city’s Public Art Committee. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Columbia University, and attended the Centro de Arte Flamenco y Danza Española Amor de Dios, (Madrid, Spain), as well as the dance department at Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, WA). In 2021 she completed a residency at the Bainbridge Dance Center in which she researched blending notions of self perception, body, and camera as collaborator. Sarah lives, works and makes art on Bainbridge Island, WA, the ancestral land of the Suquamish People.