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Sadé Mica (Visual Arts, 2022)Sadé Mica, Charity Shop Checked Shirt, 2017

Sadé Mica

Shortlisted in 2022 for Visual Arts

Sadé Mica tests the extent to which their body is both freed and restricted within gender and performance, their perception, their queerness and their interactions with the world. Using poetry, film, photography and textiles, Sadé documents the evolution of their understanding and identity, choosing to use their practice as a vector to explore their fluidity and impermanence in a space removed from their personal relationships. ALWAYS 23 AT EVA (2018) sees the artist dancing in EVA bar, Manchester, while a poem interjects throughout discussing their feelings towards perception, posture and movement, examining their gender performance while blocking out other’s gazes with their headphones and thereby denying gendered expectations.

In the Binder Series (2020) the hidden garment used by trans and gender non-conforming people to  feel more aligned with their bodies is turned into an outerwear piece, some embroidered with poetry, highlighting and celebrating visible markers of transness. It Teks Time (2020) is a large bedsheet embroidered with the notes from Sadé’s counselling sessions, accompanied by a film of an outdoor counselling session they conducted with themself in Malham, Yorkshire. Sadé explains, “I explore how my body is both freed and restricted, liberating myself and my limbs in the British countryside, posturing against vast landscapes foreign to me, capturing the stillness of my form and thoughtful movements as well as those more chaotic and less considered.”