This site is a record of projects that are not necessarily finished but have reached a definitive manifestation. Each may yet inform or become something else. The work holds and investigates, from different positions, the long shift we are living through – from a world understood as objects in space and time, toward one that might be seen as information and fields. The title borrows from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi's account of the anarchive (2016) as a "feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process," in which traces are "carriers of potential" and archives serve as their waystations. The works span original photography, text, found materials, machine-learning-generations, and digital installation.
Ongoing concerns include perception and technological entanglement, and questions about what leads us to value various language materials differently.
For notes, published writing, work-in-progress and artist information, including commission details, please visit Field Notes.
Zines and prints are available to purchase.
Massumi, B. (2016) 'Working Principles', in Murphie, A. (ed.) The Go-To How-To Book of Anarchiving. The SenseLab.
Sense & Reason
Sense & Reason was an eighteen-month online call-and-response project, enacted over social media and via email. Solicited contributions were folded back into the work itself, which explores human language and cognition across kinds, our entanglement with machine-learning processes, and the future of the image. (Or perhaps, the image of the human?)
The project initially consisted of three interrelated text-images made by a human (me) alongside a curatorial statement compiled by a proprietary large language model. Friends, colleagues and strangers were invited to intervene, and in turn these interventions have been responded to and used to generate further images: feedback loops become the core material.
With permission, material was added to an online tanglegram. You can view a collection of doodles, thoughts, and possible essays for inclusion in a resulting printed publication here. During a residency with Six Minutes Past Nine's Hybrid Realities Lab, invited and recursive interventions were taken into a 3D space and experimented with – another stage in an ongoing process that will arrive, perhaps only for an elongated moment, at a zine. The invitation is now closed, but you can still download the original prompt, 'engineered for humans', as a PDF.
Zine due Summer 2026
Sense & Reason initially came into being while taking part remotely in the exhibition and research project who nose? in February 2025 at Smith and Gertrude Gallery, Australia, for Victoria’s PRIDE Street Party. Thanks to Pattie Beerens and Stuart Black.
BHAM💥
BHAM💥 The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine is an imaginary product and service designed to help humans come to terms with their impending obsolescence. Assembled from seemingly disparate images, it is a conceptual object that provides guidance and self-help exercises – not for purchase by consumers, but to demonstrate how purchasing, consuming, and identity maintenance operate as informational pattern-creation within the limits of one's parochial position. It processes whatever temporary configurations (human, machine, theistic entity) engage with it and has no interest in the entity's interpretation – be that honest recommendation, dark humour, or outright insult.
BHAM💥 exists as an independent website and is also included as part of the The Doughnut(W)Hole, a pavilion for The Wrong Biennale (7th Edition) 2025/26, curated by Kim Shaw which ran from the 1st of November 2025 to the 31st of March 2026.
Sarah-Jane Field is a participating artist, co-producer and web designer of The Doughnut(W)Hole.
The BHAM💥 zine was supported by The Mayor's London Borough of Culture and was launched at Putney Library in 2026, and can be purchased here.
Orpheus in Homebase and Other Images features a collection of text-images that explore the cyclical nature of existence, desire and recognition, amid the overwhelming and relentless commodification of everything. Drawing on images and texts created over the last decade, some of which are transformed through generative processes and some of which are placed in relation, the work begins with its titular poem, where the mythic figure of Orpheus (or is it someone else?) materialises in a South London DIY store, simultaneously infecting and enchanting consumer encounters – manifesting moments of longing, (mis)connection and fantasy. Blending the mythological with the quotidian, the project creates a space in which a pair of kitsch secateurs carries the same emotional weight as ancient lyre songs, and where the fluorescent-lit aisles of retail spaces are a place for jouissance in the mundane. Where, ultimately, all that we can ever know is what has been brought to the delirious recording surface that is modern existence.
Self-published booklet, 60 pp inc. covers. Inner pages: 115gsm gloss; outer pages: 350gsm Colorplan. Includes text and image sequences. Edition of 25. Publication 2025.
Purchase here.
Technical Empathy
A diagram made during an online residency with the PostHuman Network, organised and curated by Sepideh Majidi, inquiring into commonly held assumptions about empathy and machine-learning. The residency also led to a related piece of writing: The Gap and the Wave.
(Opens in Miro)
2024
"The task of the Speaker for the Dead is to bring the dead into the present, so as to make more response-able living and dying possible in times yet to come."
Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway
Using old materials and contemporary tools, I have 'grown' the few pixels I have of my father as a child and blended them with my childhood images. Objects and memories are reduced to information and reformed. Part of ongoing experimental research that explores the fluidity and potential [in]determinism of novel media (2023).
ReConstitution
From Antique Lands by Julian Huxley, 1955, pulped and reformed with words from Thomas Nail’s essay, Migration, Borders and Writing, 2019; inkjet on home-made paper with looped video, 2mins.
Included in a group show titled Belongings (2024), which celebrates the contribution of migrants and refugees to British culture. Here, we show work made by refugee artists and makers who have attended Central St Martins (UAL) over the last century, alongside new work by staff, students and recent graduates with migration in their family history. Together, they advance a new experiential understanding of what it means to ‘belong’ in the context of global migration and illustrate the lasting value of the cultural contributions made by those who have moved to the UK.
Belongings was co-created by Susan Aldworth, Sara David, Natalia Mesa Echavarria, Sarah-Jane Field, Silvina Maestro, Julia Shutkevych, Michaelle St Vincent and Judy Willcocks, with support from CSM’s Creativity in Action Fund.
Text in artwork from Nail, T. (2020) ‘Borders, Migrants, and Writing’, Konturen, 11, pp. 152–173. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.11.0.4831.
In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object is a collaborative project where found, synthesised, printed, and digital artefacts meet in unusual configurations. Their juxtaposition sparks an enigmatic visual dialogue between a range of materials.
Maria Ahmed uses collage strategies to excavate, fragment and disrupt images, opening them up to multiple, unstable readings. In turn, Sarah-Jane Field positions seductive and elliptical 21st-century machine-generated output in conference with found visual fragments from 20th-century books that focus on photographic flaws and supposed [im]perfections. In a sequence that welcomes unpredictability, a dance of resistance and control emerges as artists performatively push and pull against the work – and each other – in a playful conversation about today's image-saturated culture (2024).
A5 booklet, 48 pages including cover, on recycled natural uncoated paper 100gsm, cover 250gsm. Purchase here.
Prenatal Hallucinations
Images made to accompany a written piece published on Source Magazine's website titled Beyond Romanticism: Relationship Advice for the Now (2023).
'My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother's body with relative ease, but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection.
Soon afterwards, my mother and I were carried by the machine through the sky to meet my father waiting in Southern Africa. But not before the machine suspended little moments of us in London, surrounded by geriatric ladies in floral dresses…
Prenatal Hallucinations (Machine Babies): prenatal scans from my family album, generatively expanded, filled and cropped using AI editing software.