Sarra Shepherd is a British artist, working and living in the Welland Valley.
Her interdisciplinary arts practice is located in the triangulation between art, ecology and advanced technologies.
As a daughter of an engineer, musician and writer, she grew up on the edge of a small hosiery town where she spent her childhood immersed in nature.
Sarra was exposed early on to new technologies in 1980’s and, coding Basic into a ZX spectrum with her brother at the age of 10, she produced early graphics and played adventure games.
However, she turned back to go outside, grow trees, fish for frogs and sticklebacks, weave, and make things with her hands.
Sarra attended Coventry University, initially wanting to be a sculptor, but instead followed a track into experimental, CGI and craft-based stop motion animation.
It was here that she produced early analog interactive and immersive work that included sewing paper kinetic sculpture, mapping digital images onto 3D projection screens, and short animated films.
These were constructed and filmed while working in different spaces including the craft studio, digital production and the natural environment.
Her early work was influenced by artists such as William Kentridge, Andy Goldsworthy, Theo Yansen and Len Lye; as well as eastern european animators such as Jan Svankmajer, Yuri Norstein and Lotte Reiniger.
She went on to continue her immersive-interactive academic research and practice-based experiments, teaching and delivering papers at Royal College of Art, Birmingham City University and The University of Southern California, USA, in the field of animation.
In 2018, Sarra began to produce interactive and immersive projects that integrated cross reality, virtual, augmented and mixed reality development XR (VR,AR,MR), using Unity and Unreal Engines.
The work oscillates in the space between the natural environment and fully immersive HMD VR experiences, converging traditional arts practice such as cyanotype and sewing, with advanced digital technologies including cgi modelling and immersive world creation as it engages with themes of human vulnerability, states of mind, and war and conflict.
Sarra’s most recent work, entitled ‘Femme’, experiments with the medium of cyanotype and virtual world making to explore the theme of sexual desire, to discover what it means, and how it feels, to be a woman living in a technologically advancing, ecologically uncertain, conflicted world.
