Sophie York - MA Painting
Sophie York Artist
Sophie York’s aesthetic presents a constant dialogue between presence and absence,
rooted in the tension between ephemerality and permanence. She explores the act of
looking back, how we engage with the past and how pictures shift in meaning over time.
Exploring the cyclical nature of culture and nostalgia by reinterpreting imagery from
vintage magazines In the 70's. Her paintings play with the contrasts of the time and contradictions of feminist message.
The artist invites the viewer to participate emotionally with the work romanticising older
forms of mass media that now seem rare, tangible and imperfect. She transforms the
fleeting into the enduring. Images that were never intended to be singular or permanent,
flipped through, discarded, replaced. By translating into oil paintings, the process
reverses their ephemeral nature, amplifying its materiality and slowing down our
engagement with images that were meant to be quickly consumed.
The play of paint gives the images a new ‘aura’ one that is tied to the act of painting.
Sophie builds the painting on a florescent pink ground with subsequent thin layers of
transparent paint and glazes creating a hazy timeworn affect that has softened with
time creating a dreamlike quality. The ‘Blur’. The materiality of the paint
deliberately obscures sharpness and details or leaves certain areas unfinished.
Sophie’s work is not just about longing for another time but more about examining why
we long for it and what we hope to find there.
