Sarah Isabelle Tan is an artist and researcher based between London and Singapore. Her practice unfolds through writing and a post-medium framework that is guided by material sensitivity and embodied processes of making. Approaching the image not as representation but as relational encounters that sustains presence across distance, her work engages with surfaces, forms and gestures that dwell at the thresholds: between proximity and distance, visibility and disappearance, presence and withdrawal. Writing accompanies making within her practice, both forming gestures of address that are ways of reaching and attending to what remains beyond reach. Her interests lie in the poetics of care, relation, and remaining-with what simultaneously slips, withdraws and lingers.
Sarah is currently undertaking a Master of Research at the Royal College of Art London. She graduated from the University of the Arts, London College of Communication in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts, First Class Honours in Photography. Her work has been exhibited in London and Singapore and published in The British Journal of Photography. She was a recipient of the Objectifs Centre Documentary Award 2020 and a still image category finalist of the inaugural Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize 2021. Her works were also presented at S.E.A Focus 2022 with Sullivan+Strumpf. She was a lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore from 2021-2024.