Bio

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist who has exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, India and Korea since the early 2000s. She has an MFA (Honours) from Elam School of Fine Arts (2012). In 2016 Sarah was a recipient of the McCahon House residency in Titirangi on Auckland’s west coast. Her research at that time culminated in the exhibition Light Language at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Titirangi, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

For the last decade, her work has included installations and diagrammatic and graphic evocations of syntropic energy fields, which she describes as ‘mahi tahi collaborations with and within the wider energetic field’ – of which Joy Field – Transcendence 3 (2023) is an example. Her dynamic and charged compositions, where intentionality and authorship are broadened beyond the singular into an activated dialogue with universal and present energies, allow for chance, play and external forces to enter into the creative process.

To facilitate this exchange, Smuts-Kennedy deploys a pendulum to guide the subjective notion of choice in the work’s creation and to interrogate the role of the artist as but one player within a larger ensemble.

This approach was examined by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Curator Contemporary Art Natasha Conland in her 2017 essay ‘Sarah Smuts-Kennedy’s Expanded Field’. ‘They are clearly abstracts made in a state of abstraction … The drawings have been built in rapid development … However, they are not explicitly “in nature”, whilst our relative consciousness may situate us there, these are without doubt representations of the inexplicable … somehow between science and art. The colour field depicted comes as close as Smuts-Kennedy has yet to the representation of that unfamiliar space – the field of spiritual energy.

Exhibitions

• 2024   LAKA, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Sounding New Beginnings
  
  
• 2024   Northart, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Abstraxt Abstraxt
  
• 2024   Laree Payne Gallery, Kirikiriroa Hamilton: Rhythmical Relations
  
• 2023   Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington: Energy Work
  
• 2023   Sydney Contemporary, Laree Payne Gallery: Discharge
  
• 2021   Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: When the Dust Settles
  
• 2017   Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Light Language
  
• 2017   Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Frequency of the Earth