Dionne Sparks

Born in London, Dionne is an artist and educator, whose practice circles questions of histories, temporality and embodied knowing through abstraction and the transformation of materials. She gained a First-Class BA Hons in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University before completing the MA Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art. 

Writing and speaking engagements extend her practice. She was a collective member of Feminist Arts News magazine and contributed an essay to Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, ed. Maud Sulter.

Dionne spoke as part of a discussion panel on the occasion of Maud Sulter: The Centre of the Frame, an exhibition from the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She contributed to a panel discussion at the Fruit Market, Edinburgh, addressing the question: to what extent Pindell’s abstractions, and abstraction in general, can be political. View Dionne's panel contribution here.

A blog written for the Liverpool University's Victoria Gallery and Museum, revisits her work, Conversations, acquired for the University of Liverpool’s collection in 1990 and traces the trajectory of her work from then to her current practice.

Dionne is a recipient of The Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award 2021.

Working in series through linked bodies of work, I circle questions of histories, temporality and embodied knowing. What is it to move through this world and make stuff? To push through accumulated materials and bend them? Probing the edge. The shifting between fingers, the moving limbs. The elusive horizon fluttering, and the thing is never done.

Ranging from flat palimpsestic ‘blackboard’ paintings, draped textile installations, to sound and photographic experiments, marks and gestures loop through the work forming an expanding conversation in which identities are always forming. 

To animate the work I employ the haptic, song and writing to provide a texture and methodology. The work is a space of reflection, conversation, and agency. It is a gesture in the world. A way to leave a trace. 

‘The door signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora’, Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return