Nature / Nurture is a solo exhibition by acclaimed portrait artist Sarah Jane Moon, exploring queer identity, place, and the evolving idea of home through two interwoven bodies of work.
Opening in London in July 2025, the exhibition features large-scale portraits of influential UK-based LGBTQIA+ figures - including the newly unveiled portrait of writer Diana Souhami and activist Peter Tatchell - shown alongside recent work from Aotearoa New Zealand. These include intimate portraits of queer friends in richly observed landscapes, and vivid studies of native birds and flora. Together, the works trace lines of connection across hemispheres, generations, and chosen families - celebrating resilience, lineage, and the quiet radicalism of visibility.
The title Nature / Nurture reflects both debates around identity and the artist’s bicultural heritage. It asks how we are shaped by our environments, natural and social, and how queerness, migration, and creative practice challenge fixed ideas of belonging. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what it means to live outside dominant narratives, while staying anchored in land, memory, and community.
Rendered in luminous oil paint with gestural mark-making, Moon’s portraits are alive with colour and emotional resonance. Her sitters, ranging from cultural icons to close friends, are portrayed with intimacy and pride. The UK works act as visual tributes to queer trailblazers, while the New Zealand series reclaims a personal and political connection to place.
This exhibition marks a pivotal moment in Moon’s career, building on increasing recognition by national institutions, critics, and collectors. It furthers her longstanding commitment to representing queer lives through figurative painting and contributes to wider conversations around visibility, legacy, and community.
Nature / Nurture is more than an exhibition - it is a timely portrait of queer life across distance and time. A catalogue will accompany the show, as well as several informal events which offer space for dialogue around portraiture, queerness, and the politics of representation.
Sarah Jane Moon is a New Zealand-born British painter known for bold, large-scale portraits that explore identity, gender, and connection to place. Working primarily in oil, her figurative paintings are rich in colour, gesture, and surface. Her work is held in major collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Soho House, and the James Wallace Trust. She has exhibited widely - at venues such as the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and New Zealand Portrait Gallery - and has received awards including a Queer Britain Art Award prize, the Arts Charitable Trust Award, and the Bulldog Bursary for Portraiture. Moon is Chair of the Contemporary British Portrait Painters and works between London, Sussex, and the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand.