Sarah Danays: Arms of the Martyrs

While I was working in the Sculpture section at the V&A, I answered enquiries from the general public, and facilitated access to our stored objects for artists and researchers. This is how I met the artist Sarah Danays, who was making a sculpture in response to one of the V&A’s medieval alabaster panels. Finding the results nuanced and complex, I gave a paper on the sculpture at the conference ‘Bodies re-formed: Materiality, Transformation, and the Performative’ at Durham University. The acting director of Durham’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture attended my talk, and got in touch with Danays, offering her a residency. I wrote a catalogue essay for the resulting exhibition.