Sarah-Jane is a multidisciplinary artist, performance designer and deviser.

Her practice brings together fine art, performance, immersive technologies and site-responsive experiences. Her work investigates dark and macabre themes with a sometimes surreal humour and naive aesthetic. She seduces the viewer into an unexpected world with underlying currents of a bizarre and menacing nature. Man vs Nature and the decline of the environment is a strong theme throughout her work. She creates participatory encounters that invite new ways of seeing and disrupt ways of thinking.

SJ will be exhibiting a new interactive work for Sculpture on the Gulf 2027 https://www.sotg.nz/

In 2023, Sarah-Jane completed an artist residency with Blake New Zealand. Through the organisation’s environmental leadership programmes, she deepened her engagement with climate and ecological issues, culminating in Night Flight – A Journey to Rewild, a site-specific nocturnal performance created with the Waiheke Island community that explored our need to reconnect with nature.

Recent projects include Im’Possible Promenade, an interactive augmented reality art trail developed in response to the changing ways audiences experienced art during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work was commissioned by the Urban Walking Festival Auckland (2023) and the Whangārei Fringe Festival (2022).

Her immersive virtual reality performance A Fantastical Journey by Boat received the Whangārei Fringe Festival award for “a work that pushed the boundaries of a traditional genre and stepped into the unexpected” in 2020, before being selected to represent Aotearoa at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2021.

Sarah-Jane’s practice is driven by curiosity about how emerging technologies can expand storytelling, deepen participation and open new dimensions of creative experience.

She lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

For current projects, follow @sjblakeart.