Above, The Colour of Mourning
Sally de Courcy MRSS is a British sculptor and installation artist whose practice explores precarity, embodiment, collective trauma, and the politics of witnessing within contemporary social, political, and ecological life. Working across sculpture, casting, and materially driven assemblage, she investigates how vulnerability, displacement, illness, and grief become embedded within bodies, objects, and collective memory.
Her work is informed by questions of grievability, fragility, and affective encounter, examining whose lives are recognised as visible, valuable, and mournable within contemporary culture. Through processes of repetition, accumulation, and serial casting, she mobilises bones, domestic artefacts, architectural references, and symbolic materials to create immersive sculptural environments that negotiate tensions between beauty and disturbance, intimacy, and unease.
Addressing themes including forced migration, climate crisis, pandemic isolation, colonial legacies, and structural violence, de Courcy’s installations seek not to illustrate political realities but create spaces in which viewers engage emotionally, physically, and ethically with questions of transience, loss, and human value. Her work invites viewers into spaces of reflection, discomfort, and ethical proximity, where material form becomes a means of engaging with shared human vulnerability.
Originally trained and employed as a medical doctor, de Courcy’s movement into fine art practice following illness profoundly shapes her conceptual and methodological framework. The intersecting perspectives of clinician, patient, and artist inform an ongoing enquiry into bodily fragility, institutional power, and the lived experience of uncertainty and dependency. Her medical background contributes not only thematic content but also a critical sensitivity to the ways bodies are regulated, categorised, protected, or rendered expendable within social systems.
She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MFA with Distinction from UCA Farnham and is a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Her work has been featured in Flux Review, Artist Talk Magazine, and Articulate Magazine. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Venice and throughout the UK, with presentations at the Royal Society of Sculptors, Saatchi Gallery, Ovada Oxford, Fresh Air Sculpture, and Tŷ Pawb, where she received the People’s Prize in 2023.
Above, Ceiling Rose
AWARDS
2024 October shortlisted for Holocaust Centre North residency.
2023 Awarded The Peoples Prize at The Ty Pawb Open, Wrexham, Wales.
2022 Member of Royal Society of Sculptors.
2020 Joined Continuum, www.craftcontinuum.co.
2020 Highly Commended for Human Rights series, Redline Artworks.
2015 Short listed for Jon Bird Prize
Above, Walked Over,, Detail
EDUCATION
• 2016 MA (Distinction) Fine Art, UCA
• 2014 Scholarship for MA, UCA
• 2014 BA Hons Fine Art (First Class),UCA
• 2008 Access Art and Design, UCA
• 2007 ECDL diploma in computer skills.
•1989 Member of Royal College of General Practitioners by examination, Royal College of General Practitioners
•1987 Diploma of Child Health, Royal College of Paediatrics
•1985 Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, University of London.
Below, Queen Anne Ceiling Rose, Detail.
.
Sally de Courcy is a British sculptor and installation artist whose practice explores precarity, embodiment, collective trauma, and the politics of witnessing within contemporary social, political, and ecological life. Working across sculpture, casting, and materially driven assemblage, she investigates how vulnerability, displacement, illness, and grief become embedded within bodies, objects, and collective memory.
Her work is informed by questions of grievability, fragility, and affective encounter, examining whose lives are recognised as visible, valuable, and mournable within contemporary culture. Through processes of repetition, accumulation, and serial casting, she mobilises bones, domestic artefacts, architectural references, and symbolic materials to create immersive sculptural environments that negotiate tensions between beauty and disturbance, intimacy, and unease.
Addressing themes including forced migration, climate crisis, pandemic isolation, colonial legacies, and structural violence, de Courcy’s installations seek not to illustrate political realities but create spaces in which viewers engage emotionally, physically, and ethically with questions of transience, loss, and human value. Her work invites viewers into spaces of reflection, discomfort, and ethical proximity, where material form becomes a means of engaging with shared human vulnerability.
Originally trained and employed as a medical doctor, de Courcy’s movement into fine art practice following illness profoundly shapes her conceptual and methodological framework. The intersecting perspectives of clinician, patient, and artist inform an ongoing enquiry into bodily fragility, institutional power, and the lived experience of uncertainty and dependency. Her medical background contributes not only thematic content but also a critical sensitivity to the ways bodies are regulated, categorised, protected, or rendered expendable within social systems.
She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MFA with Distinction from UCA Farnham and is a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Her work has been featured in Flux Review, Artist Talk Magazine, and Articulate Magazine. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Venice and throughout the UK, with presentations at the Royal Society of Sculptors, Saatchi Gallery, Ovada Oxford, Fresh Air Sculpture, and Tŷ Pawb, where she received the People’s Prize in 2023.
AWARDS
2024 October shortlisted for Holocaust Centre North residency.
2023 Awarded The Peoples Prize at The Ty Pawb Open, Wrexham, Wales
2022 Member of Royal Society of Sculptors
2020 Joined Continuum,
2020 Highly Commended for Human Rights series, Redline Artworks
2015 Short listed for Jon Bird Prize
EDUCATION
2016 MA (Distinction) Fine Art, University of Creative Arts.
2014 Scholarship for MA, University of Creative Arts.
2014 BA Hons Fine Art (First Class), University of Creative Arts.
2008 Access Art and Design, University of Creative Arts.
2007 ECDL diploma in computer skills.
1989 Member of Royal College of General Practitioners by examination, Royal College of General Practitioners.
1987 Diploma of Child Health, Royal College of Paediatrics.
1985 Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, University of London.
Follow her @decourcysally