Dr Sarah Horton

Dr Sarah Horton is an artist and Reader in Fine Art, teaching across all levels of BA (Hons) Fine Art and currently supervising three PhD students. Her art practice and writing focusses on repetitive action, pattern, and decoration as tools for questioning class, labour and site. She is currently Year 2 co-lead of the BA and is on the steering committee of the university’s Fine Art and Photography research group.

My practice-led PhD ‘Decoration: Disrupting the Workplace and Challenging the Work of Art’ examined the critical potential for decoration in artworks to provide both forms of connection and disruption in corporate and commercial workplaces such as the factory or office. These artistic interventions prompted questions about my own status as a worker and the value of my time and labour spent as an artist. I have explored this in ‘Sifting for Pips and Stalks’ a solo exhibition at The Cut (Suffolk, UK) in April 2026. This includes a film made with Sam Tring that compares a typical day in my studio with a day at Matthew Walker, a Christmas pudding factory I worked in as a student.

Throughout my work there is the pulse of repetition, whether using printed pattern in sculpture or repeating the same stripe motif again and again on 10m long scrolls of paper. I have written extensively about the relationship between repeition and disruption, including the co-edited book ‘Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life’ with Victoria Mitchell.

I am an editorial board member and peer reviewer for the journal ‘Drawing Research Theory and Practice’ published by Intellect.

Research and Practice

• 2026 ‘Sifting for Pips and Stalks’ exhibition at The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk, UK (solo show)
• 2025 ‘Drawing Military Lines’, artist book made as artist-in-residence at Norfolk Regimental Museum, Norwich
• 2025 Presentation for the ‘Visual Art, Narrative and Class’ conference at Turku University, Finland.
• 2025 ‘The Open Drawing Exhibition at the Arctic Circle’, Galleria Napa, Rovaniemi, Finland
• 2024 ‘Thinking Through Drawing’ group exhibition, Cromer Artspace
• 2024 Horton, S. and Girling, D. ‘WaterAid: Representing Development through Art and Developing Artists through Representation’ in Ware, V. et al. (eds.) Handbook of Arts and Global Development, Oxford and New York: Routledge.
• 2024 Video contribution to ‘Making Bread with Your Feet: How do we learn to talk through gestural moments and speculative acts’ prod. by Ayliffe,M. et al, for the Midlands Conference of Critical Thought
• 2023 Awarded Reader in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts
• 2023 Horton, S. and Mitchell, V. (eds.) ‘Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life: critical intersections and creative practice’, Bristol: Intellect Books.
• 2020 Horton, S. ‘The Lion King? Drawings of the Lion Garden Ornament’ in Drawing Research Theory and Practice, Volume 5, Number 1, April 2020 pp. 99-109
• 2020 Horton, S. ‘Exploring the ‘penumbra of the nonverbal’: The relationship between writing and making in a practice-based Ph.D.’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Volume 13, Number 2, 1
• 2019 Horton, S. ‘Serial Killers? Investigating some modernist myths about decoration, pattern and ornament through workplace interventions.’ in Journal of Illustration, Volume 6, Number 2
• 2019 Horton, S. ‘Hard Graft? The office chair as a site for decorative interventions.’ in Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, Volume 16, Issue 1
• 2019 Guest editor for Drawing Research, Theory and Practice journal edition 4.1 ‘Drawing Pattern and Chaos’
• 2019 ‘Discerning Eye’ group exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
• 2018 London Conference for Critical Thought organiser for ‘Writing to Think’ stream
• 2016 ‘Constellation’ exhibition, The Undercroft, Norwich
• 2016 ‘Disruptive Decoration’, EAST GalleryNUA, Norwich (solo show)
• 2016 Research Fellowship award, Norwich University of the Arts
• 2016 ‘British Art Show 8’ Learning Co-ordinator for events in Norwich including a 45’ foot Float for the Lord Mayor’s Procession; two late-night ‘takeover’ events at Norwich University of the Arts and Norwich Castle Museum; interpretation leaflet and resources room.
• 2015 Two-day artist-in-residence at ‘Build Your Own’ exhibition, Norwich Castle Museum
• 2015 ‘We all draw’ Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London. Selected by Tania Kovats and Kelly Chorpening
• 2015 Installation of six site-related art works at Berendsen Laundry, UK. (solo installation)
• 2013 ‘“Let’s get comfortable”’ installed at Aviva Head Office, St. Helens, London (solo show) 2013 ‘Developing visual proposals as a ‘route to knowing’ within site-related artworks’: a paper presented at and published by the ‘Knowing (by) Designing’ Conference, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Belgium

Other Activities

• 2024 – present: Member of the Research Degrees Committee, Norwich University of the Arts
• 2021: Higher Education Academy – Senior Fellow
• 2019 – 2024: Champion for the Pattern and Chaos research group, Norwich University of the Arts
• Member of the National Association for Fine Art Education

You can view Sarah’s publications on the Norwich University of the Arts Repository, and explore her website.