Sadie Clayton

Sculptor | AI

Sadie grew up in West Yorkshire, and she is a Jamaican British fusion. In this environment, Sadie had to learn how to be comfortable with not fitting into usual cultural norms, pushing the boundaries of the different cultures that she was embedded in. Her creativity and artistry thrived through the realisation that sense of community is not given by the ability to fit into a ready-made box, but it stems from the coming together of like-minded souls that, through a spirit of collaboration and sharing, can achieve more inspiring and unexpected results. Sadie believes that in a world where individualism is increasingly growing and the drive for immediacy and mental exhaustion are becoming the norm, the higher force of communal creativity is a powerful tool to create a safe environment. In this surrounding, the cultural diversities and talents brought by each individual collide and result in an explosion of greater artistry, which has its root in a strong sense of community.

Sadie herself represents the amalgamation of different cultures, and this is reflected through her practice, by her desire to explore multiple disciplines, resulting in her constant need of innovation and determination to blur the thresholds between different artistic fields.

Sadie’s creative journey starts at Kingston University in 2013 with a BA Honors Fashion Design. Fascinated by design and innovation, Sadie took these foundations to explore the creative boundaries between art, technology and fashion presenting her Spring /Summer 2017 collection at the Royal Academy of the Arts in holographic form in collaboration with MHD holograms; creating bespoke content with Adobe films for their Visionnaires story, and FisForFendi; and presenting her working process with copper through Augmented Reality for her Spring/Summer 2018 collection.

Sadie is well known for her signature copper sculptures. This material is characterised by its malleability, multifaceted beauty, and healing and spiritual proper9es: its history in the field of medicine and significance as the conductor of information, speed and overall positive energy led Sadie to become passionate about it and to choose it as her primary medium of expression.

Nowadays, she has over 10 years of experience working with copper. Sadie has showcased and demonstrated the art of working with this metal as a part of the Nick Waplington / Alexander McQueen: Working Process exhibition at the Tate Britain, and she leads several workshops at the Tate Modern most recently as part of Late at the Tate and at the Ace Hotel as part of London Cra> Week 2019. Sadie started to take her creativity away from the confines of the body and released herself as a creator and innovator debuting her copper wearable art at Art Basel Miami at the Red Dot Gallery, and later at the Museum of Art and Design as part of Singapore Design Week.

In 2018 in Shangai, Sadie took these demonstrations of her artistic process to another level: she broke any boundaries between art and technology through her second collaboration – following the success of COGX in London in the same year – with Sophia, the first ever social, humanoid robot, programmed through AI and created by Hanson RoboKcs. Sadie and Sophia continued their exploration together of Sadie’s creative process, and the artist’s journey to harness Art, Design and Technology became a reality during the event at Shanghai fashion weekend, as Sadie designed bespoke, copper and 3D printed arm cuffs for Sophia. This on-going conversation resulted in the presentation of Sadie’s latest work in New York in April 2019 as part of the Designing Our Future exhibition, in which she broke down the mental barriers between human and humanoid.

In October 2019, Sadie became the first artist to create works of art together with the first Artist robot, Ai- Da. The event was held at the Tate Modern as part of the Tate Exchange program, and the aim was to explore the theme of the technology as the extension of a human being and how its transformative power can influence society, specifically in terms of facilitating or exacerbating existing racial dynamics. As part of this creative exchange between Human Artist and Robot Artist, Sadie took inspiration from Andy Warhol’s video portraits to explore the limits of a humans’ virtual self, and she created short workshops where she dynamically responded to Ai-Da’s drawings. Sadie created moodboards that served to develop a small scale prototype of the Copper Sanctuary, a place in which we can meditate and heal our mind. In light of the theme, and the pandemic issue of mental health, Sadie wanted to reinforce the concept that technology, combined with artistry, can be used as a positive tool to improve our overall state of mind.

The art world has fully acknowledge Sadie as a unique creator and innovator within the UK art scene. She was recently interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on their Only Artists program with the renowned industrial designer, artist and architect Ron Arad, and they discussed her perspective on what it means to represent an ar9s9c fusion with no creative boundaries. She was invited to create a video by Art Fund for the current V&A museum exhibition of Frida Kahlo, a huge inspiration for Sadie’s work, and another iconic female artist. Sadie also curates the ING Discerning Eye exhibition in November 2018 and created the 2018 copper Christmas tree for The Ivy Granary Brasserie, drawing a significant national and international acclaim.

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