Lou Lou Sainsbury

Lou Lou Sainsbury (she/they) is a trans artist based in Margate, UK & Rotterdam, NL, working across film and live-performance, poetry and drawing, installation and textiles. She identifies as a time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into tricksterish dreamscapes, informed by queer & ecological activisms. She often works in collaboration, developing intimate long term research-led projects guided by improvisation, cinematic processes and sonic thinking.

Lou Lou’s work explores trans-sensual poetics, questioning how we can become better listeners and how to trouble historicity and geography. Recently her work maps a constellation of saints, holes, mist, vampirism, aliens, hauntings, musicality and elemental passions, writing slippery narratives in the realms of science-fiction and gothic-horror.

Lou Lou graduated from the MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in 2021, and was awarded Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme. Previously she was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017, after completing her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016.

She has exhibited individually at Gasworks, London; Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022) and Well Projects, Margate (2020). Recent performances and group exhibitions include: Motto Books, Berlin and Whitstable Biennale (2022); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Prague (2021); Yaby and La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2020); Tate Modern, London; Nottingham Contemporary; Yaby, Madrid (all 2019) and Flat Time House (2018).

Watch Lou Lou Sainsbury's 20 minute performance pollen spools out, words scatter through a waiting room window for UNDERSTORY CHANT ~ Aeroponic Acts 2021, August 2021 in Arnhem. 

Learn more about 's written MA thesis (DAI, 2021): A Fantastic Body after the End of the World when the Body has no End

Follow Lou Lou's "Life after DAI" by means of her/their website and instagram