Sarah Jayne Booth is a multi-media installation artist. Consistent themes across her practice include a feminist
perspective of concepts that draw from gender-based, normalised, systemic oppressive structures within state
institutions. Sarah Jayne’s experimental/multidisciplinary praxis expands on these topics in new work, shaping
insights into violence and analysing how it’s connected to, and embedded in, these patriarchal structures. These
installations consist of subverted reconfigurations of domestic objects that ordinarily carry benign social historic
contexts; the distortions to their narratives and strange tensions are conceived by how things are placed/held in
relation to each other.

(for) All Our Grievous Doings, her newest work primarily explores femicide. Derived from the Greek word
‘mīsoguníā’, the term misogyny was first coined in English in 1615 after Joseph Swetnam’s anti-women rant in
his pamphlet ‘The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward and unconstant women’. 400 hundred years on (for) All
Our Grievous Doings examines this historic demonisation of women that persists in current times. From myths
that vilified women such as stealing penes, tests like swimming the witch, to an all out purge are explored and
knitted together using artefacts, text and an ethereal soundscape. An uncanny ensemble of voices and
reverberations synchronise with the opulent materials and discarded domestic objects – creating a conflictual
aesthetic environment striving for balance. The normalisation of the everyday threat of violence is recast and
held within the ill-ease that the work emits: a psychosocial setting of brutality and mundanity. Multiple cultural,
historical and social narratives are interwoven throughout the installation and there is never a shortage of
anecdotes to draw from. As the title of this work suggests, (for) All Our Grievous Doings, opens a dialogue
across this ongoing ‘history’ of violence against women, asking such questions as, What exactly are women
guilty of? How do the punishments commensurate with the crimes against women? Who are the aggressors?
What are the defence mechanisms of self-preservation? Where does the notion of equality reside within this
scenario?