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All Sarah Cole's research involves the orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations in contexts beyond the gallery or museum context. The collaboration is a dialogue and exchange, to gain access and insight into a particular community, and the form of the output includes social events, performances, multimedia presentations and educational debates.

Sited in the field of ‘new genre’ public art, Cole's research negotiates the tension between political activism and community art and draws upon the methodologies of archaeological, educational, and theatrical practice.

Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, HOME is an example of this research approach. Sarah Cole worked in collaboration with elderly local residents for two years to form a temporary sited community, with whom she explored common themes emerging from a sustained conversation around shared cultural experience. Funded by Bridge House Trust, Corporation of London, ACE and City of Westminster Arts Council, this research led to the making of a 6 minute video using digital animation to create a performative domestic landscape, in collaboration with filmmaker Karl Cresser. This work was exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery Sackler Education Space for a period of three weeks during 2004.

Sarah Cole is a visual artist who makes work in contexts beyond the gallery or museum. Her practice involves the orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations with people in their environments. Through consultation with different communities, the work attempts to generate a non-exclusive dialogue with its participants and their milieu, adopting a language of reciprocity to establish opportunities for sharing and participation in the work. Her research takes the form of performative events and recordings, multimedia installations and educational presentations.

Over the past five years Cole has worked in a number of educational situations where she devises programmes to commission artists to undertake field research through critical artistic engagement with school site-users, so that they become at first participant but then eventually also audience and sometimes activist. Artists and theorists such as Grant Kestner, Miwon kwan and Suzanne Lacy offer a contemporary critical framework from which to engage with this work. Nest, 2008 is the most recent product of this research, in which Cole has collaborated with artists, CSM students, teachers, support staff, governors, community wardens, parents and children to devise a promenade performance event in which the school presents itself to a visiting public in the form of a series of performed installations - the evidence of this enquiry is documented at www.nest-life.com.