Sandi Hudson-Francis
Portrait of an Almshouse
Sandi Hudson-Francis was commissioned to make a film portrait of a community and their home at a time of change. Over 18 months 2022-2023 the artist visited Edward Edwards House, attending the weekly knitting club and chatting over tea in residents flats as the moving date approaches. The film gently documents the lives, histories and relationships within this South London community and their echo in the gradually emptying flats and garden.
Sandi is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist whose practice consists of photography, moving image, sound, and sculpture. Having grown up in a single-parent family as a person of mixed race and in a predominately white environment she is sensitive towards and conscious of what it means to belong and find herself committed to exploring through her practical notions around race, class, gender, and diasporic culture and identities.
She is particularly interested in the ways in which the past and the present intersect and histories that are forgotten and often misrepresented. She believes that by amplifying the voices and experiences of people from marginalized communities we can begin to challenge concepts around how we can both resist certain kinds of conservative representation and at the same time create new and exciting representations.
Selected exhibitions and screenings: The Decolonising Lens – Super Sam , Barbican Centre, London (2021); Lambeth Heritage Festival , 198 Contemporary Arts, London (2021); Super Sam , Sheffield Doc Fest (2021); Super Sam , National Portrait Gallery (2019); Everyday Now , Copeland Gallery, London (2018); Minotaur Maze , Crypt Gallery, London (2017); A bath of self-esteem , Ferrara Residency 2017, Galleria del Carbone, Ferrara (2017); Selected Drawings , Dorchester Court, London (2016).