Sophie Perkins
Degree: BA Fine Art
University: Falmouth University
Graduation Year: 2020
New Blood Art Commentary
Sophie Perkin’s work plays with time, space, matter, weight — all the descriptors of elements that characterise our world. Inspired by renowned abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, Perkins traces the very becoming of form in all its contradictions. From dependence and liberty to fragility and strength, the whole gambit of life is captured in one mark or ‘soak-stain’. Working in monochrome and colour, her paintings aim to surprise the viewer in appearing simple at first, and only slowly revealing the complex differences in each mark and layer of varying density and translucence. Pigments blot and bleed, to the effect that the work appears to live and breathe before us.
Artist Statement
The contemplative and dynamic energy of the work oscillates between chance, control and careful restraint. Membranes of flooded pools of pigment transcend mechanisms of the sensory perception intertwining Nature and the 'nature of being'. Human nature is an active process. We are constantly becoming, finding meaning in the world and each experience is a way of learning and evolving.
Phenomenology philosophy enlightens the metaphysical sense of the sublime – A deep rooted feeling awakened by the interaction with landscape and nature, beyond the sensation of awe and inspiration into reaching a higher sense of ‘self’ as a radiation of the fabric of the world. The intuitive play of paint ignites the conscious/subconscious role, unfolding the term the ‘inner landscape’.
Working with watered down acrylic mediums and natural pigments, I use a pouring and soak-stain technique that has its own ‘living’ quality to achieve fluid notions of transcendence. The use of natural pigments leaves traces of the physical world to take precedence in the body of paint and seeps, bleeds and ingrains deep into the weave of the cotton duck.
It is through the process and act of making that the connection to nature is sustained and rediscovered. The raw canvas has an important role. The neutral ground creates ‘breathing spaces’. It provides an area away from illusion and accentuates a contemplative space; a space of balance, liminality and changing states. By eliminating non-essential forms and features, the exposed compositions amplify meanings of medium and process. They hold on to the essence of form, materiality and alchemy of paint allowing for the subtleties of paint and surface to be acknowledged as entities of their own.
Working on large scale canvases requires a more immersive painting approach using bodily gestures, rather than directed from the wrist and brush, I catch and drag the paint with my hands and arms, I quite literally ‘carried the landscape in my arms as a did it’ in the words of Helen Frankenthaler.