Shelley Sacks is an artist whose interdisciplinary work is concerned with dialogue, creative agency, facilitating new vision and the role of imagination in transformative social process.

Her work ranges across performative actions, mapping processes, interventions, and dialogue processes to facilitating ‘spaces for new vision’ toward an ecologically sustainable world.

After graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1972 (with distinction), Sacks 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, 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 the Sustaining Life Project (SLP). (See below *).

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. Shelley is currently working with cultural scientist, Dr. Hildegard Kurt, as part of an annual European Programme in Weimar, Germany, to explore new methodologies of engagement concerned with the relationship of the aesthetic dimension 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) and the 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 to the shaping of a democratic and ecologically sustainable world. Sacks’ 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 and cooperatives, as well as writing, performing and lecturing in a range of contexts across the world.

Shelley Sacks at Cultura 21’s event during the Venezia Biennale in September 2007

Interdisciplinary practices with special emphasis on ‘social sculpture’, an ’expanded conception of art’, ‘connective aesthetics’ and ‘ecoart’

• The relationship between art, culture and sustainability
• The work of Joseph Beuys
• The relationship between responsibility, the aesthetic and working toward an ecologically sustainable future.
• New methodologies of engagement, creative agency and strategies for becoming ‘imaginatively active’
• Non-discursive thought and its relationship to strategies for connecting more deeply with the world around us
• Creating spaces in civil society for ‘making visible the invisible’
• Participatory practices, ‘tools’ for consciousness and ‘spaces for new vision’, that engage participants in working consciously with thought, feeling and will as materials of an expanded conception of art
• Parallel process methodologies that combine rational argument with imaginal thought
• Different modes of consciousness and thought, with special reference to aspects of new science and Goethe’s holistic methodology; Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education of the human being’, archetypal psychology and eco philosophy.
• ‘Memory work’ and approaches for shifting from habitual thinking into new territory
• The role of the net and ‘mapping’ technologies in social sculpture processes
• Joseph Beuys’ idea of an expanded conception of art and its relationship to freedom, direct democracy and sustainable economic forms
• Responsibility - not as a moral imperative, but as an ability to respond.
• The role of active imagination and synthetic thought in empowering us to shape a different kind of world.

Thought Bank – Invited to do new thought and memory project for the City of Hannover, Germany. Research and development phase begins late 2005 and builds on previous ‘thought bank’ projects developed for Edinburgh Festival in 1994 and 1995.

The ‘Legacy of Beuys’ – invited guest curator of online exhibition for ‘greenmuseum.org’

Sofas in the City – Oxford – begun in 2002. Phase two of this project will involve youth and schools in the region and in Wales.

University of the Trees, a long-term social sculpture project with Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Nature (and for the City of Darmstadt, under discussion)

Milk Futures (linked to the Sustaining Life Project – creating a ‘space for new vision’ involving consumers, producers, government departments, NGO’s and other stakeholders.)

Developing web based platforms for the SSRU and the Sustaining Life Project

Exchange Values publication based on Social Sculpture Public Forum and Think Tank – including papers by cultural geographers Gail Davies, Luke Desforges and Prof. Paul Cloke

Spaces for New Vision - a net-based ‘permanent conference’ social sculpture project as part of ‘Sustaining Life Project’

Yellow Star – a live intervention project under development in several cities in Germany

Mobile Phones Opera - under development – with cultural geographers and composer, Nigel Osborne

1000 Voices – A social sculpture meeting process and sound installation. Exploring the development of collaborative teams in USA and Germany.

For the Love of the Land – a cross sector ‘space for new vision’ meetings project under discussion with groups in northern Russia.

Translation and introduction by Shelley Sacks to What is Art? – A Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Edited by Volker Harlan, Clairview Books, Forest Row, UK. 2004.

Catalogue with essays on the Exchange Values project for the World Summit on Sustainable Development – Johannesburg Art Gallery (Funded by the Arts Council of England) Johannesburg 2002.

Sacks’ Exchange Values project is the focus of a chapter by Wallace Heim in ‘Performing Nature. Explorations in ecology and performance’ (2005. Bern, Peter Lang).

Other unpublished texts on the Exchange Values project were presented at a recent think-tank in Birmingham (May 2004) by cultural geographers Gail Davies, Luke Desforges and Prof. Paul Cloke. http://www.exchange-values.org/

Source: http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/staff/details/sacks/