Sydney based artist Sophie Victoria’s hybrid art practice combines painting with new media. Her non-traditional works affect a rich sensory language; a felt archive, exploring themes of identity, illusion, perception, and the sensory body. She fashions iridescent fabrics and soft media over luscious painterly gestures that pulsate; inviting the viewer to step into a psychological terrain that’s constantly shifting. You don’t just look at Sophie’s works – you are encouraged to enter them.
There is a kind of spectacle to her work where material becomes seductive, almost fetishised - echoing the idea that the ‘spectacle’ alters consciousness and how we relate to each other. Her use of material is active. A hyperreal, imaginary terrain where everything is heightened, immersive, and emotionally loaded. All of her works simulate a virtual image while censoring another, bending vision and perception into something unstable and perpetually shifting. Sophie’s site-specific installations heighten this sensibility further through hypnotic LED displays that harness light, motion, and sound. Unapologetically loud, arresting, and slightly dangerous, these works bend reality and disrupt visual perception, asserting an undeniable presence before you even see them.
Beneath the spectacle of her work is a vulnerability and a deep fascination with humanities; Sophie’s complex psyche impressed through the medium whilst centring art as a locus for uncovering deep truths about the human experience. The invocation of covering, hiding, and wrapping in her work can be read like a body dressed with clothes, or a wound beneath a bandage. As the stretcher bars are the bones, the structure, the scaffold, the canvas is the body and the skin. The vinyl and spectacle is the protection; the facade. It’s playfully intimate then suddenly distanced – layered, protected, performed.
It’s beautiful and a bit disorienting, but I think that's the point.
Sophie lives and works in Sydney. She is significantly recognised both nationally and internationally for her work. She has exhibited in major international fairs including Contemporary Istanbul, Art Miami, Art Toronto, Kiaf Seoul, and Expo Chicago. Sophie's international solo debut, QUALIA, was held in Montreal in June 2024. Her recent exhibitions also include Her Alchemy (London, 2024) and DARING (Sydney, 2024). Sophie has also been a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Art Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sophie recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the National Art School (2024).
Words by Tara Macintosh
Photo by Peter Morgan