si sapsford
Kinetic Sculpture
Movement is never used simply as spectacle. It is the means through which familiar domestic objects become active metaphors for systems under pressure.
Movement, tension, balance, and collapse are central to these works. Using motion, elastic tension, sound, and repeated mechanical action, these installations explore systems under pressure and the fragile thresholds between stability and failure.
Made during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, after hearing a pianist perform below the studios. The title comes from Van Dyck's allegorical painting Time Clipping the Wings of Cupid, seen in Paris the same day.
Civil Unrest
exploring the uneasy relationship between the individual and the collective. Thirty found chairs repeatedly advance towards the viewer before retreating, their movements caught between confrontation and hesitation. Using simple mechanical systems, the work transforms familiar domestic objects into a restless crowd whose intentions remain uncertain. The sculpture emerged from a personal experience of political violence. During the aftermath of the American invasion of Panama in 1989, I found myself trapped in an angry crowd and was forced to seek refuge inside a cathedral before escaping through a back entrance. It was the first time I became aware of my own vulnerability within a crowd, and that memory has remained with me ever since. Yet crowds are never simply threatening. They can embody fear and aggression, but also solidarity, resistance and hope. Protest has repeatedly shaped history by challenging injustice and demanding change. Civil Unrest deliberately refuses a single interpretation, asking instead how we understand those who stand opposite us, and how fear, empathy and collective action continually shape society.
So This is Love...... Then?
An exploration of relationships and the fragile balance between connection and separation. The work considers the attraction and resistance, dependence and independence, conflict and reconciliation that shape personal, professional and political relationships. Sound becomes part of the emotional language of the work. What begins relatively quietly can become increasingly agitated as tension builds, the mechanical strain echoing the frustration of a relationship that has become difficult to sustain. The work asks how long we continue trying to hold a relationship together, and at what point letting go becomes necessary.
Everything is So Great - the state of things
presents a quietly absurd tableau: two empty chairs face each other, mechanically waving Union Jack flags in a ritual of mutual display. Stripped of human presence, the gesture becomes hollow — patriotism performed without an audience, dialogue without voices. The work explores the circular nature of political signalling, where symbols are repeatedly displayed but meaning can stall. The familiar domestic chairs become participants in a choreographed performance of national identity, bringing politics into an everyday space. Si Sapsford is a British sculptor working across kinetic sculpture, installation, drawing and moving image. Her work explores movement, instability, politics, memory and the structures that shape everyday life.
Heavy Duty
Heavy Duty is a kinetic installation created in London in 1999. An old Formica table lies on its back, its legs raised into the air. Powered by a car battery, it rocks and flails, its drop-down side flaps rising and falling as if waving for help. Slowly, one by one, the legs fall away. The familiar domestic object becomes unexpectedly vulnerable: exposed, helpless and struggling beneath the viewer’s gaze. Designed for everyday service, the table is transformed into something bodily, comic and uncomfortable. The work explores the unstable boundaries between the domestic and the bodily, service and vulnerability, familiarity and threat. Sexual vulnerability and domestic servitude are present without being explicitly named. The title refers to the car battery that powers the work—“heavy duty”, built to endure. The irony is quiet, but persistent. Heavy Duty is an early example of Sapsford’s ongoing interest in movement, domestic objects and the psychological relationship between object and viewer.
Ideal Couple
This kinetic sculpture composed of two chairs, one repeatedly moving against the other. One chair has been deliberately altered so that the connection between its back and seat becomes a hinge. As the mechanism moves, the chair rises and falls against its companion in a repetitive, intimate gesture. The movement evokes the subtle contact that might take place beneath a dinner table—a leg touching another person, pressing against them, apparently unnoticed by those around the table. What appears from the outside to be an ordinary social situation may contain an entirely different interaction beneath the surface. The work plays with the ambiguity of that contact: is it invited or intrusive, intimate or uncomfortable? The viewer is left to decide. Using familiar domestic objects, Ideal Couple explores the boundaries between public and private behaviour, intimacy and intrusion, and what is visible and what remains concealed. The chairs become a metaphor for the unseen interactions that can exist beneath the surface of social situations—the tensions, desires and negotiations that may remain invisible to everyone else.
Liberty Storming the Barricades
Liberty Storming the Barricades takes its title and visual starting point from Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, the iconic 1830 painting commemorating the July Revolution in France. Where Delacroix’s Liberty advances triumphantly over the barricades, Sapsford offers an upturned table carrying two white flags of surrender. The familiar domestic object becomes a symbol of defeat rather than victory; the flags replace the gesture of heroic resistance with one of exhaustion, submission and loss. The work questions the way war has traditionally been represented through images of heroism and glory. Beneath the rhetoric of victory are civilians caught in conflicts they did not create—people displaced, injured, killed or left without food or shelter. The white flags acknowledge a reality largely absent from heroic histories of warfare. The table introduces another dimension. An object associated with domestic life, gathering and nourishment is overturned and rendered useless. The political enters the domestic, while the domestic becomes a reminder of what is ultimately at stake in conflict: ordinary lives. Liberty Storming the Barricades also considers what happens after the violence. As time passes, history is edited, simplified and made more palatable, often shaped by those who hold power. The work asks what is lost when the complexity and human cost of conflict are replaced by the cleaner narrative of victory.