The show features key pieces including Menstruate With Pride, a monumental self-portrait painting of Maple, blood stained from a period whilst surrounded by colleagues. In Signs, Maple herself can be seen holding three placards reading “I wish I had a penis, because then I’d fuck you, and steal your job” – a work which helped win her the Saatchi New Sensations prize while still a student. More recent works such as 2020’s Sexy Nazi Shark Show, a sitcom as video art made for Sky Arts (exhibited in its entirety for the first time), show the breadth of Maple’s sense of humour and creative provocation.

Meanwhile, photographic works like her Disney Princess series question notions of archetypal storytelling by recasting well known Disney characters as politicians, scientists and football managers. The central works in the show, Anti Rape Cloak and Freedom of Speech are perhaps the most confrontational. In the latter, a video work in which the artist directly addresses the camera, she begins a feminist polemic only to be slapped repeatedly to the point of tears, silenced by the sting of violence.

Sarah Maple (b.1985) graduated with a BA in fine art from Kingston University, London, in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions held at: Jealous, London (2020),  The Untitled Space, New York (2019); KochxBos Gallery, Amsterdam (2021). She has been awarded a Sky Arts Scholarship in 2015 and 4 New Sensation Art Prize in 2007 and has been commissioned by The Baltic, New Art Exchange and Sky Arts.

Sarah's work has been the subject of documentaries including for ARTE and VPRO. In 2015 she released her first book 'You Could Have Done This', a hardback art book of selected works. In 2017 she was invited to Tedx in Birmingham and gave a talk on the importance of free speech in 'The Freedom To Be Challenged'.

In 2015, Sarah was awarded a Sky Academy Arts scholarship which included funding, mentoring and a documentary. With the scholarship she exhibited a new body of work at New Art Exchange in August 2017. Maple lives and works in Sussex.