Naoshima Artist in Residence and Setouchi Triennale
2024–2025
McCahon House together with founding partners STILL and Asia New Zealand Foundation, developed the Naoshima Artist in Residence, a new month-long residency opportunity for a New Zealand artist in Japan, to coincide with the Setouchi Triennale in 2025.
Sarah split the residency into two, two week periods and traveled to the Seto Inland Sea in September 2024 and April 2025. Both in Japan, and at home, she produced a body of work made up of moving image, earth-pigment watercolours and sculpture entitled The Stones Remember, and I Listen.
Belonging & Belonging II
HD Video, colour, sound, 11:30min
Soundscape by Kahu Kutia and Sylvan Spring
Belonging explores themes of connection, identity, and resilience by depicting the act of floating in open water while clutching a hyper-realistic rock that resembles an island. Crafted from expanding foam and a Hue (gourd) grown in Whakatāne soil, the rock blurs the boundary between the natural and the artificial, symbolising my deep longing to anchor myself to whenua while grappling with the tension between authenticity and artifice.
Here, Belonging offers a quiet meditation on reconnection, survival, and the enduring, unbreakable relationship between tangata whenua and the land.
The Stones Remember, and I Listen
Stone walls serve as a shared visual language between the islands of Megijima and Moutohorā. On Moutohorā, remnants of pre-colonial defensive stone walls remain within the landscape - structures I have only seen through photographs of archaeological reports. At Wairaka in Whakatāne, my family’s home for generations, a stone wall built in 1919 from Moutohorā’s rock stands as a tangible connection to the island - a presence on the horizon that many of my relatives have never physically experienced.
This watercolour series explores geographic and psychological separation from ancestral lands. Using natural earth pigments gathered on both Megijima and Moutohorā, represent my effort to unify fragmented knowledge and restore connection across time and distance.