Virga Gallery

Biography

Sarah-Jane Field (born 1971) is a British visual artist and writer with a wide-ranging field of knowledge that supports her work. Her interest in digital culture began in 2015 and by 2017 she was working and documenting publicly through blogs and other digital platforms. Working with machine learning processes, digital image generators, and large language models (LLMs) as another form of media since 2019, her interests span the spectrum of social science, feminist politics, and philosophy, to quantum physics. Drawn to narrative as an integral element in human thought and socialisation, Field engages with image, text, and language games to explore this dynamic, and to subvert the inherent inequalities found there. In 2022, her project why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/, which used this strategy, was one of seven national projects to be selected for Quad’s Future Focus, and it received a FORMAT Festival Award. She is keenly interested in how algorithmic and networked technologies trouble and unsettle our deeply inscribed ways of being – socially, politically, and philosophically.

Her project, Sense & Reason, featured here on Virga Gallery, was an eighteen-month online call-and-response project, enacted over social media and via email. The project explores human language and cognition across interrelated text and images, its entanglement with machine-learning processes, and the future of the image – which can also be understood as the image of humanity. Sense & Reason first came into being in February 2025 when Field, working remotely, took part in the exhibition and research project who nose? at Smith and Gertrude Gallery in Australia. The project evolved during a residency with Six Minutes Past Nine, a thirdspace for artist research, and Field has recently published a zine of the project, along with a commissioned critical text, ‘Feeling Smartly: In the dust motes’ for Clot Magazine and Six Minutes Past Nine.

Field has published numerous zines which are held in private collections. She has written for Technoetic Arts, Lexiconia.art among others, and a text for the BSP Business and Law School for publication by Springer is forthcoming. She was Co-Producer of The Doughnut (W)Hole Pavilion for The Wrong Biennale 7^th edition, which ran from November 2025 to March 2026. This project, curated by Kim Shaw, surveyed the breadth of artwork being produced with machine learning processes for the biennale theme ‘embrace a world transformed by AI.’ What Field and Shaw discovered was that digital image generators were being used to fill in gaps and to mend tears – in memory, presence, objects, family histories, and even raising the dead. In 2023, she won the Hahnemühle Award for Most Creative Use of Hahnemühle Paper for her work, LAMELLA://print. That same year it was nominated for the MullenLowe NOVA Award. Sarah-Jane Field is on the Advisory Board for [cloud].