Sarabande artist reshapes discarded materials into vibrant, textural sculptures—where sustainability meets bold contemporary craft.
Darcey Fleming doesn’t just make sculptures–she conjures environments, inviting us to see the power repurposed materials (combined with her talent) can hold. A resident artist at the Sarabande Foundation since 2023, Fleming is a multidisciplinary force working across sculpture, photography, performance, and wearable art. Yet it is her sculptural practice—built from the frayed edges of rural life—that most distinctly defines her growing legacy.
The Sarabande Foundation, a London-based creative charity founded by the late Alexander McQueen in 2006 for artistically bold individuals, has welcomed Fleming back for the second year, helping her showcase her work and gaining lasting connections with industry giants such as Selfridges and the Saatchi Gallery.
With a farming background, Fleming’s bold designs use baling twine, a synthetic cord used to tie hay bales, usually discarded, burnt, or left to decay on farmland. Fleming reclaims these threads—collected from the British countryside or donated by local farmers—and transforms them into vibrant, tactile, and almost mythic sculptural forms. “I don’t dye any of the baling twine– I use what I find and am given–the twine comes in all these fantastic bright colors,” she says.
Fleming uses her own “self-developed weaving process”, she says, “it involves cutting, knotting and splitting the twines over and over again.” Unlike most traditional weaves, she ‘hides’ the neat side and exposes the back, giving her sculptures a flowing weave and “an interesting mohair-like texture.”
The sculptures vary greatly in size and form. Tall sprawling towers, snaking up from the floor; bulbous furniture: benches grown rather than made; and chairs that look pulled out of the ground, roots still attached. She also creates great vine-like walled tapestries and wearable weaves that blur human and sculpture. Whether worn or observed, Fleming encourages interaction with her pieces.
“I want it to exist wherever it wants to, and I want it to dissolve boundaries.”
Darcey Fleming
Although existing in a multitude of forms, it is important to Fleming that her work is free from categorization “I want it to exist wherever it wants to, and I want it to dissolve boundaries,” she says. Recently, her work has been shown in the Chelsea Flower Show in a major commission by the Saatchi Gallery and Aesop (a patron of the Saatchi Gallery.) The installation—set within the gallery’s garden space—included a collection of large-scale twine sculptures, each playing with the idea of gathering, celebration, and land-based tradition. Her other works, including a sprawling chair and wall tapestry in bubble-gum pink and tangerine, complemented the high street for Aesop’s Chelsea In Bloom display.
“My current goal is to do more public sculpture, in locations where many people can access and benefit from my work,” she says. However, this ambition is already being succeeded. In a Sarabande Selfridges collaboration window display for artists and designers, Fleming’s work flowed boldly out an enlarged weaving loom, amongst other fellow Sarabande talent. Later in March of this year, two more of her chairs took centre stage inside Selfridges, one of which (in Selfridges yellow) was purchased by the department store to keep.
Fleming’s practice isn’t defined by the places it’s shown—it’s shaped by where it begins. Once a piece is completed in a studio, she often returns it to the place where the twine is sourced. Completing the circle of her work introduces her photography as she captures the pieces. “I interact with them, draping them over found things in the landscape, getting inside of them, taking them to the sea and moving with them,” she says, “it brings the works to life, it connects me with the works, and the works with the landscape.”
Fleming’s activation is about interaction, on a human level, bringing her pieces to life with her filming and photography, while the observer activates them while understanding them. Like her work, she also connects with people directly. This October, Fleming has a workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery and a pop-up exhibition at the London College of Fashion, presenting ‘wearable’ sculptures as a part of her shortlisting for the East London Art Prize.
“My academic studies are pretty key to my well-being as an artist (and person).”
Along with artists such as Martin Creed, Francesca Woodman and Georgia O’Keeffe being inspirations to this young artist’s work, Fleming’s own studies continue to inspire her. Having already achieved a BSc in Social Sciences from University College London, she is now completing an MSc at the London School of Economics.
The desire to continue her studies alongside her art practice was because of her “fascination with people and psychology,” she says. The institutions (UCL and LSE) give her the structure, challenging to implement in the arts: “My academic studies are pretty key to my well-being as an artist (and person),” she says.
Fleming admits she feels “lucky” to have been awarded a second year at the Sarabande Foundation. But she has also made some of her own luck, taking the tools of her surroundings both physically and metaphorically by earning, gathering and creating original pieces that carve their place in any environment.
Homepage image chair left: 90 x 104 x 95 cm and chair right: 84 x 112 x 76 cm; top left image Chelsea Flower Show 2025 commissioned by Saatchi Gallery and sponsored by HSBC and top right collaboration with AESOP, at Duke of York Square for Chelsea in Bloom.
All images courtesy of the artist.
