Sophie Meyer is an artist who, following a career in film production, has begun creating a body of works inspired by a personal preoccupation with sensations of (un)safety and drawing on experiences of the ‘failure’ of her body. Sophie seeks to understand and express the confusing 'empty-full', the emotional absorbency and embodied cognition that arises from the complex intergenerational dynamics of families with a legacy of trauma.
In her sculptural work she experiments with tensions between forms and materials, to create discomforting encounters of weight and fragility, pliability and porousness, softness and coarseness, evoking bodily sensations that come with anxiety, dread, disassociation and repressed anger. She seeks a visual and material language to express the unspoken, the pre-verbal, the unsayable. Often working without a preconceived outcome and looking to embrace chance behaviours of imagery or substance, her work is led by experimentation and intuition. Sophie has both an instinctive draw and powerful aversion to certain materials, and plays with things which speak to her of the bodily or elemental – drawn to the chalky matt-ness and quick setting nature of plaster, the humble softness of domestic floor cloths, thread or twine or the abrasive challenge of scourers and taut elastic or inner tubes. Recent work utilises the form of the funnel with its implications of flow, compression and ‘through-ness’ and of what uneasy traces, residues and blockages might cause dysfunction and obstruction. Some speak to a sense of comfort (a nest perhaps, but an unheimlich one with a hole), whilst others evoke feelings of vulnerability, prickliness or grubbiness. In collage and photographic work, her self image is deployed to reflect on the haptic and relational nature of a body’s experiences in the world; on what makes us feel contained or constrained, exposed or concealed and the disquieting comforts, and discomforts, of those states of being. Pondering the challenges and absurd futility of truly connecting with another’s reality - and of how often we can feel like unreliable narrators of our own experiences - her works attempt to reach out and connect with the universal. |