Sarah Amy Fishlock lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, she works mainly with lens-based media, found images and publications. Her work explores the relationship between the individual and wider social, historical and political realities, the tension between individual and familial identity, and the problematic nature of memory. Her degree project, Middlemen, a portrait of three Iraqi former British Forces workers now resettled in Glasgow, was exhibited at the Scottish Parliament in 2011, as well as being featured by Foto8 magazine and BBC News In Pictures. Other notable projects include Amye & Ahren, documenting a family living with autism, and a 9-month period as Artist in Residence at Glasgow’s Citizen’s Theatre in 2013/14, during which Sarah worked on a range of collaborative photographic projects with theatre staff, audiences and community members. Sarah is also editor of the Glasgow-based photography zine, Goose Flesh and has produced several zine publications documenting her projects – these are held in several collections including St. Andrew’s University Special Collections and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, London. Sarah was a finalist in the Magnum/ Ideastap Photographic Award 2014, and in 2016 was selected for a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Calumet Gallery (New York) the British Council Gallery (Delhi), Landskrona Foto Festival (Sweden), Consul’Art (Marseille), the Scottish Parliament (Edinburgh) and V&A (London), and featured by BBC News In Pictures, The Guardian, Foto8 and Firecracker.
Five Lands
My mother’s family came to Scotland in the first decades of the 20th century from the hill towns around La Spezia in northern Italy. The notion of permanence is tied to the idea of economic migration, the definitive leaving of one geographical space for another. Yet, in my family and in many Scots Italian families of the diaspora, the yearning to return recurs. This duality, of living out a concrete existence in one country, while yearning for another, is unique to the immigrant experience, existing far back in my family’s memory and the collective memory of all immigrants. As the bloodline marches into the future, the link to the country of origin becomes ever more tenuous – an almost magical place, it is wrapped in mystery. Five Lands is an ongoing long term project documenting the region and exploring the strange, uncomfortable nostalgia of a third generation immigrant.
To view more of Sarah’s work please visit her website.