Sadie Hennessy The End of the Pier Show (II), 2012

These works are photographic etchings created whilst I was artist-in-residence in the Printmaking Department at Croydon Art College back in 2011-2012.  I used vintage seaside postcards to create a digital collage of the piers on fire, and then photographed them and turned them into etching plates, which I printed from. The image of a pier on fire works as a metaphor for me, for the climate emergency - humans having a nice time whilst the earth heats up to unsustainable levels.  This idea seems more pertinent than ever so I decided to submit these works to 'Small is Beautiful.'

Sadie Hennessy is a multi-disciplinary artist whose roots lie in collage, but who has expanded her idea of collage to encompass the third and fourth dimensions, creating immersive environments and events, reflecting the zeitgeist. Her work tends to operate in the realm of metaphor. Recently she's started to utilise performative elements in her practice, using her body and autobiographical stories, to explore universal topics. All this is done through a dark prism of melancholia, mixed with a sense of humour, that comes from the blacker end of the comedy spectrum. She has exhibited widely in London and beyond, won the Jealous Graduate Art Prize in 2010 with her MA show 'Accident & Emergency' (Central St. Martins) and was Screen Print Fellow at The Royal Academy 2016-19. Her work is held in the UAL Collection and the Victoria & Albert Print Collection.