Sydney based artist Sophie Victoria’s hybrid art practice combines painting with new media sensitivity. 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 between painting and lived experience, 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 how we relate to each other. Her use of material is active. A hyperreal, imaginary terrain where everything is heightened, immersive, and emotionally loaded. The surface dances; illuminating and altering the space it occupies, and vice versa. 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; Sophie’s complex psyche impressed through the medium. The underpainting is censored under a shimmering veil that creates a threshold between the two surfaces. This invocation of covering, hiding, and wrapping is 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, both shield and armour. It's the most vulnerable part of us. Sophie seems to capture something euphoric about the act of making. This raw, vulnerable relationship we have between the artist, the studio, the material and the outside world. It’s intimate then suddenly distanced – layered, protected, performed. You feel them. 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