Bending Horizons introduces you to the mission, vision and passion for making art to the summit of Mt. Everest. Artist-Astronaut Dr. Sarah Jane Pell is exploring a translocated embodiment through extreme performance in a series of expeditions from Sea, to Summit, to Space 2015-2017. Follow this website as Sarah returns to Nepal for the 2017 climbing season: seeking the blessings of Sagarmāthā to continue this extraordinary high altitude space analogue expedition and feature film.
Performance artist and occupational diver, Dr. Sarah Jane Pell is best known for pioneering "aquabatics". She has exhibited and performed internationally since 1997: usually underwater or in museums. Pell also designs experimental space-analogues, produces speculative fiction, live artworks and publishes widely. She was awarded the Best PhD Art & Science by Leonardo AS, MIT 2007 for her aquatic-practice-based performance theses. Themes of human-aquatic adaptation to other worlds and other extreme-performance interfaces are central to her work. Dr. Pell is a NASA suborbital spaceflight experiment PoSSUM Artist-Astronaut Candidate and TED Fellow.
Dr. Pell’s practice seeks to embody, and critique, the culture of exploration and redefine our visions of future worlds. She performs expressively and builds novel prototype apparatus to test and communicate from the field. Artifacts include sculptural, technical, poetic and media events. Her work is widely exhibited, performed, published and recognised. In 2015, Dr. Pell attempted to summit Mt. Everest: making art on-route. She survived the Gorka earthquakes unharmed. Her expeditionary-art will contribute new knowledge on media and communication design for extreme performance. It also promotes physical conditioning, creative visualisation and communication.