Shelley Sacks

Her work includes creating arenas and spaces for new vision; developing connective practices and new methods of engagement; and facilitating transactions, interventions and exchanges in our work toward a humane and ecologically viable world.  She describes these processes, forms and practices as 'instruments of consciousness', in contrast to 'objects of attention'.

After graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1972, Shelley studied in Germany with Joseph Beuys as well as taking up a postgraduate scholarship at the Kunstakademie, University of Hamburg in 1974. Working between Germany and South Africa throughout the seventies and eighties to develop new forms of work and non formal education, she continued, in the framework of the Free International University, founded by Beuys and Heinrich Böll, to explore the social sculpture ideas in dialogue with Beuys until his death in 1986. 

Since 1990 she has been based in the UK. Alongside her interdisciplinary social sculpture projects she has developed the Social Sculpture Research Unit (SSRU) and Earth Agenda (EA). 

Her political, cultural and artistic experience across cultures, countries and disciplines is also manifest in the new artistic strategies and innovative pedagogic practices - concerned with empowerment, imaginal thought and transformation - for which she is well known. She is currently working with cultural scientist, Dr. Hildegard Kurt, as part of a European Programme in Weimar, Germany as well as developing a Connective Practices network, exploring new methodologies of engagement concerned with the relationship of imaginal thought and culture to sustainability. 

Her acclaimed social sculpture project, Exchange Values (http://www.exchange-values.org) with banana growers and consumers that was presented for the tenth time in 2002 at the World Summit for Sustainable Development; as well as Mound (1992); Thought Banks (1994/95) Sofas in the City (2002 -ongoing); Landing Strip for Souls (2000 ongoing), University of the Trees and new collaborative projects with geographers, composers, homeopaths, scientists and NGOs - are all examples of an expanded, interdisciplinary art practice that explores the relationship of imaginal thought and 'new organs of perception' to the shaping of a democratic and ecologically sustainable world.

Shelley's work includes more than forty live actions, site works, projects and installations; grass roots cultural and political work in South Africa in the 1970's and 80's with a focus on social sculpture, cooperatives, and joined-up thinking and doing, as well as writing, performing and lecturing in a range of contexts across the world. 

She is particularly interested in creating 'spaces' for bringing unconscious agendas to the surface and getting a sense of our inherent mobility; a sense of how we can truly change our minds. 

Shelley is Reader in Art in the Arts Department at Oxford Brookes University, Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit and coordinator of the Earth Agenda project.