About

A practice rooted in place

Sarah-Alice Miles is a New Zealand printmaker working in linocut and woodcut, based on the Canterbury Plains of Aotearoa. Her practice centres on questions of home, belonging, and distance — asking how place is learned over time, and what it costs when that relationship is disrupted or lost.

Miles trained in Europe, where her printmaking practice began. The experience of living and working at a remove from the country she would return to gave her a particular kind of double vision: the ability to see Canterbury not as background, but as a condition — something acted upon the body, the eye, and the sense of self. That distance, geographical and psychological, runs through everything she makes.

Her current body of work, Reflected Ground, explores home and belonging through the figure of the hare. Introduced to Aotearoa in the nineteenth century and now woven into the Canterbury landscape, the hare is a creature that inhabits a place it did not originate in — familiar with the terrain, but never wholly native to it. Through slow, hand-carved marks in lino and wood, Miles returns to this figure again and again, allowing meaning to accumulate through repetition rather than resolution. Works are printed at A1, A2, and A3 scale, primarily on European and Japanese papers selected for their capacity to hold atmosphere and scale.

Before establishing her printmaking practice, Miles spent years researching and writing about the Christchurch earthquake insurance crisis — a period in which thousands of families were displaced from their homes by a combination of natural disaster and institutional failure. Two published books came from that work. The experience of watching people lose not just their houses but their sense of place deepened her understanding of what belonging actually requires, and sharpened the questions her printmaking now asks.

The work begins with looking slowly. It ends — if it ends — with something held open rather than resolved.

For a full account of the practice and its conceptual concerns, see the Artist’s Statement.

Background

Printmaker, psychotherapist, lawyer

Miles came to printmaking by a long route, and the route is not incidental to the work.

She trained first as a lawyer — a discipline built on the capacity to hold an argument under pressure, to identify what a thing actually is rather than what it appears to be, and to maintain rigour precisely when the stakes are highest. That habit of thinking did not leave when she left the law. It is present in how she approaches a block: what is this image doing, what would have to change for it to be more honest, what is the difference between what I intend and what I have actually made.

She trained next as a psychotherapist, working with Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gestalt, and Narrative approaches. Therapeutic training teaches you one thing above all others: how to stay with difficulty without rushing it toward resolution. How to hold something that is not yet clear and resist the pressure to make it neat. That capacity — to sit with a question that has no comfortable answer — is what makes the work possible. The hare series is not resolved. It was never going to be. The prints ask something they do not answer, and the training to tolerate that is not accidental.

The printmaking training came last: ten years in the Netherlands, at the ateliers in Hilversum and Nunspeet, working in shared studio environments alongside printmakers who had been at it for decades. What that formation gave her was not a style but a standard — the understanding that technical decisions are never merely technical, that the quality of a mark carries the quality of the attention behind it, and that the standards do not drop because no one is watching. She returned to Aotearoa with that discipline intact, and with the double vision that a decade of absence produces: the ability to see Canterbury not as familiar backdrop but as a condition, something that acts upon the body and the eye and reshapes what it means to belong.