Sarah Jane Pell

Who is Sarah Jane Pell?

Sarah Jane Pell is an Australian artist researcher and commercial diver. Her works combine the traditions of body art, extreme performance art and human factors with underwater habitat and professional diving technologies.

Pell is best known for her creative research of human performance behaviours and limits in extreme environments - usually underwater.

'Although she draws on the poetic and performative potential suggested by aquatic environments, her body of work is best described as an aestheticisation of life support systems. The body in water is dialectical, at once in communion with and conflict with water. Aquatic performance offers the possibility of an ecstatic release into the enveloping weightlessness of an azure world, yet nevertheless the body gags in the face of this fantasy, as the need for oxygen reasserts itself.'

Pell founded the Aquabatics Research Team, Australia in 2002 and completed a PhD proposing Aquabatics as new works of Live Art to Edith Cowan University.

Pell was appointed European Space Agency, Topical Team Art and Science ETTAS CoChair in 2011; and Senior Space Art Consultant to Icarus Interstellar in 2013.

She was awarded a TED (Conference)2010 Fellow.