What if your life was a movie — and you didn't know you were directing it?
Sarah Jessica
Carpark
Writer · Aerial Performer · Conceptual Artist · Sydney
What if your life was a movie — and you didn't know you were directing it?
Writer · Aerial Performer · Conceptual Artist · Sydney
Sarah Jessica Carpark is the performance avatar of Matthew Grant — Australian writer, conceptual artist and performer. SJC is not a persona in the hiding sense. It is the name of a specific investigation: into queerness as perceptual intelligence, into collapse as threshold, into the body as site of philosophical inquiry.
Based in Sydney, working across Australia and internationally — galleries, clubs, theatres, festivals and public space. Sixty percent of the practice happens live. In the air, on the floor, in the room. Most of it disappears after it happens. This site is the permanent home for that ephemeral work.
"My practice sits at the intersection of queer philosophy, contemporary spirituality, literary nonfiction and performance. I write and perform to articulate what is often sensed but rarely named."
The creative universe
UNSW ART & DESIGN Fine arts graduate. Faculty Dean's List. Twelve years yoga & somatic practice — 300hr Hatha/Vinyasa/Ashtanga training in Kerala. Vedic meditation. Reiki I–III. Three years process-oriented psychotherapy.
Opera House. Town Hall. Bad Dog. Heaps Gay. The body in the air is the argument.
Sydney Opera House · Sydney Town Hall · Bad Dog · Heaps Gay · Fremantle Arts Centre
Bungee, trapeze, fabric — aerial performance has been central to the practice for over a decade. The aerial work has been performed in public outdoor space, major cultural institutions, festival environments and intimate black box theatres across Australia.
The body suspended is not a metaphor. There is only the rope, the body, and whether you trust them. The aerial practice is where the philosophical and physical dimensions of the work become genuinely the same thing.
Ten years of shows. Clubs, theatres, festivals, public space. The primary material.
Most of SJC's practice lives and dies in the room. No recording captures it. What survives is partial — a photograph where the stage is still set, a review written on a phone in the dark, the memory of being in the crowd when it happened. This section is the archive of that disappearance.
Monologue, movement, spoken word, floor work, somatic performance — the physical register has evolved over a decade from underground queer scenes into institutional recognition: Vitalstatistix, Art Gallery of NSW, Oxford Art Factory, Melbourne Fringe, Sydney Queer Writers Festival, Hares & Hyenas Melbourne.
"Maybe, just maybe — underneath the lipstick and the laddered stockings, beneath the endless posturing and performance — was a girl. A simple girl. A small girl, who never knew she had a choice." Sex in the Carpark
Monologue, curation, lecture, PowerPoint as performance, exhibition-making. The thinking made physical.
Three performances · Performance lecture series
Three performances for Thom Smyth's Unfunded Empathy series, each structured around a PowerPoint presentation, monologue and live performance. The content ranged from the intelligence of points to the metaphysics of numbers one to ten — philosophical speculation delivered with a deadpan tone and genuine rigour.
This work sits at the intersection of academic lecture, stand-up comedy and conceptual art. It refuses the division between serious thought and camp performance.
Exhibition curated for WorldPride 2023
An exhibition bringing together intimate and meaningful objects from queer performers, artists and cultural figures. The argument: queers and minorities must platform themselves and build their own museums — because collective cultural history has consistently failed to tell these stories.
Art direction · Sydney, Melbourne, Perth
Art direction across multiple seasons of this immersive theatre production, shaping spatial and experiential design in three cities. The invisible architecture of how a room makes you feel.
Meditations for the Energy Body · Katey Plummer
A 20-page zine commissioned by Cement Fondu under Katey Plummer. Somatic intelligence, subtle perception, the energetic architecture of the body. Somewhere between art object and spiritual text.
Katy Plummer. Cowan Whitfield. Joe Pol. The body as aesthetic object and creative collaborator.
SJC's body has been a site of creative collaboration across performance, fashion, film and editorial. As model, muse and co-creator — the work extends the practice into image-making, design and visual culture.
Collaborators include Katy Plummer, Cowan Whitfield and Joe Pol (perfume film), among others. These collaborations are aesthetic compilations — they extend the SJC visual language into new registers.
The 2024 RTTS × Lucky Logo Removal campaign and the editorial work with Vitalstatistix and EnQueer reflect the aesthetic coherence of the avatar across institutional and underground contexts.
Autofiction. Metaphysics. Video essay. The page as another stage.
By Sarah Jessica Carpark · Full manuscript complete, seeking representation
A queer autofictional reckoning. A gutter confession. A breakup spell told in last night's makeup. Across bathhouses and breakups, spiritual awakenings and one-night stands — from lockdown Melbourne to rooftop sex in Sydney.
Full-length solo show with director Dino Dimitriadis. Aerial work, movement, theatre, philosophical monologue. Sex in the Carpark onstage.
Identity: A Case Study · Part I published · Part II in development
A philosophical video essay on gender, perception and awareness. Published by MaakHausMag in New York. Part II in development for international film festival submission 2026.
View on MaakHausMag ↗Welcome to the Post New Age · Seeking representation
A concise contemporary metaphysics offering a grounded alternative to both traditional religion and performative New Age culture. Built around awareness posture, dimensional perception and inner coherence.
Publisher Enquiries
"I approach spirituality as an investigative practice rather than a belief system — and queerness as a form of perceptual intelligence." Artist Positioning Statement
Every work, every stage, every publication. Drag to explore.
← Drag to explore the full record →
The writing life. Blunt Spirituality. Sex in the Carpark. Essays on consciousness, queerness and the body.
matthewgrant.com.au ↗
Yoga, Vedic meditation, Reiki, Human Design, process-oriented psychotherapy. The embodied practice behind the work.
arkana.studio ↗