Lou Lou Sainsbury (b. 1994) is an artist working across film, live performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. She identifies as a time traveler, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into tricksterish dreamscapes, exploring queer activisms, community and ecological entanglement. She often works in collaboration, developing intimate long term research-led projects guided by improvisation, cinematic processes and sonic thinking.
Sainsbury's work questions how we can become better listeners, exploring transfeminine experience as a social process of finding resonance and dissonance within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. Rooted in friendships and everyday life, haunted and heartfelt, or humorous and uncompromising, her work seeks to imagine transformative stories for more liberated futures. She received her MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute in 2021 and her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016. She was previously an associate artist at Open School East in 2017.
A Cloud That Bites, 2024 - A Cloud That Bites is a solo exhibition commissioned by Ehrlich Steinberg in Los Angeles, comprising multi-channel video installation, sculpture, photography and drawing. Constructed around two semi-fictionalized characters - Sunbeam and Fowelley - A Cloud That Bites moves between a historical and imagined past, reconstituted through Sainsbury’s own understandings of present and future lifespans. Throughout the exhibition, the artist evokes the spirits and figures of trans ancestors, describing a “process of making communion and communication with the dead”.
u give me wood for unbuilding the house, 2024 - Antique radio cabinet, wax, spray paint, stoneware glazed ceramic, peach pits, paper, text, watercolour pencil, antique glass perfume bottle, Fowelley’s Scent perfume (made in collaboration with Gabi Dao), 30 x 20 x 50 in (76 x 51 x 127 cm). Installation view: A Cloud That Bites at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, 2024.
Sunbeam Doll, 2024 - Hand-dyed needle felted sheep’s wool, tumeric, madder root, wooden marionette controller, sewing needle, embroidery thread, freshwater pearls, human hair, stoneware glazed ceramic bones, peach pits, progesterone tablets, estradiol gel packet, dental model teeth, car auto part, dried dandelions, dimensions variable. Installation view: A Cloud That Bites at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, 2024.
A Fantastic Body, 2024 - Double-channel 2K video, painted wash, peach pits, color, sound, dimensions variable, 10:40 minutes, loop. A doll of Sunbeam, a cute and chaotic personification of the sun invoking the trans Roman Empress Heliogabalus, is split open, remade and implanted with collected 'resonant' objects - a rib bone, a lock of hair, teeth, pharmaceutical hormones and a peach pit for a brain. Performed by the artist and filmed in her own bedroom and kitchen, the intimate film explores a domestic imaginary for restitching transfeminine histories, a communion with the dead and the sensual reinvention of a body with no end.
A Fantastic Body - A Fantastic Body, 2024. Double-channel 2K video, painted wash, peach pits, color, sound, dimensions variable, 10:40 minutes, loop. Installation view: A Cloud That Bites at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, 2024.
Rib Bones, 2024 - Stoneware glazed ceramic, dimensions variable. Installation view: A Cloud That Bites at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, 2024.
do you think the dead come back and watch the living?, 2022 - Stained glass, honey, dried flowers, cigarette butts, debris, steel frames. Four panel installation, each 218 x 128 x 3.5cm. Installation view: Earth is a Deadname at Gasworks, London, 2022.
descending notes - descending notes (2022) is an erotic science-fiction film that explores transness as a form of dissonance and resonance. It takes inspiration from Donny Hathaway’s heartfelt rendition of A Song for You, whose lyrics are punctuated by a discordant progression of piano notes: “If my words don’t come together, listen to the melody ‘cause my love is in there hiding… I love you in a place where there's no space or time.”
Written and performed with artists Ada M. Patterson and Raffia Li, the film is a cosmic love story between three transing beings whose desire unfolds across time and space, from the sensuality of early Christian sainthoods to future alien intimacies. Grounded in autobiographical experiences of tenderness, solidarity and grief within transgender friendships and everyday life; as the world splits apart, these undercover beings covertly learn to live in transformation and to give each other breath.
Lou Lou Sainsbury [Nov 30, 2021 at 6:12:27 PM]: just a quick one. whats ya date of birth? im putting u as a witness for my trans form, 2022 - Portrait of Lou Lou Sainsbury by Kari Rosenfeld, C-print. Exhibited in Lou Lou Sainsbury: Earth is a Deadname at Gasworks, London, 2022.
dead speak / living happens, 2020 - Hand-dyed sheep’s wool felt, madder root, indigo, turmeric, cochineal, 32.8 x 31.7 in (83.2 x 80.6 cm). Exhibition view: We’ll Be Your Mirror at Ehrlich Steinberg and Herald St for Condo London, 2024.
