Sarah-Alice Miles is a New Zealand printmaker working primarily in linocut and woodcut. Her latest project explores the concept of ‘home’ and belonging through the eyes of a hare. Considering ‘home’ in terms of endurance, exposure, landscape and migration. Landscape is considered not as backdrop but as a lived condition shaped by distance, weather, and sustained attention. ‘Home’ is considered through the slow, hand-carved processes of wood and lino cutting and rooted in the Canterbury plains of New Zealand. The works are printed primarily at A1, A2, and A3 scale using traditional relief processes and European and Japanese papers selected for their ability to carry atmosphere at scale.
Home is not a fixed idea. It shifts over time, shaped by memory, routine, landscape, and the spaces we move through every day. In my printmaking practice, I return again and again to questions of home, a sense of place, national identity, and belonging — not as something stable or resolved, but as something slowly formed.
Linocut and woodcut is central to how I approach these ideas. The process is deliberate and physical, requiring time, attention, and commitment. Each mark is carved by hand and cannot be undone. This slowness mirrors the way belonging itself develops — gradually, through repetition, familiarity, and sustained presence rather than instant recognition.
Much of my work draws on places that feel familiar: built environments, quiet edges of the landscape. These are not grand or monumental sites, but locations that quietly hold memory. Through linocut and woodcut, I’m interested in how these spaces accumulate meaning over time, and how they contribute to a personal and collective sense of “home.”
Questions of national identity sit alongside this exploration. Rather than representing identity as a singular or symbolic image, I’m interested in how it emerges through lived experience — through the places we inhabit, the structures we move within, and the rhythms of daily life. Linocut and woodcut’s graphic clarity allows these ideas to be distilled into simplified forms, while the handmade process keeps the work grounded in touch and materiality.
Printing an edition is an important part of this thinking. Repetition becomes a way of spending time with an image, returning to it again and again. Small variations between prints are inevitable, and I embrace these differences as reminders of labour and presence. They echo the idea that belonging is never uniform — it is felt differently by each person, shaped by individual histories and relationships to place.
Through my linocut and woodcut practice, I’m not trying to define home or identity in fixed terms. Instead, I see the work as a way of holding these ideas open — allowing them to remain layered, unresolved, and personal. By carving and printing slowly, I’m making space to consider how belonging is built over time, and how place continues to shape who we are.
This work begins with looking slowly… …
At the edge of open land, among familiar plants and passing birds, small signs repeat — a hare pausing, a horizon held, a flight traced and lost again. These images are made by hand, one mark at a time, returning to questions of home, distance, and what it means to belong to a place over time.
Every week join me as I explore what it means to be at ‘Home’.