Holly Sandiford

Holly Sandiford is an artist, creative evaluator and freelance arts facilitator based in Norfolk. Her practice is rooted in co-creation with people, plants, places and materials, using analogue and cameraless photography, sound, walking, deep listening, field recording, mapping and plant-based processes. Her work explores different ways of knowing and being, and how creativity can help us listen more carefully to each other, to the natural world and to the systems we are part of.

Holly has over 25 years’ experience working across arts, creative health, mental health, community and heritage settings. This includes managing an arts centre for adults with learning disabilities, leading arts and wellbeing programmes, coordinating refugee arts projects at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and developing creative health and heritage projects with communities across Norfolk, including work with Norwich City Council and Norfolk Museums Service.

Her commissions and collaborations include Hospital Rooms, the Royal Photographic Society, Space Park Leicester, the John Innes Centre and Cambridge University Museums. She is currently an Associate Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts, an artist with Kettle’s Yard co-creating work with young people, and has been working as a researcher with the Centre for Cultural Value.

Across her practice, Holly brings together artistic research, facilitation and evaluation as connected ways of working. She is interested in how listening, making, movement and shared reflection can open up different forms of knowledge, particularly in work with communities, lived experience and place.