Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the work of Sophie Cape straddles the sublime with a cathartic expulsion of energy. Exploding with violence across the page, her works are vast in scale and performative in their execution.
Visceral and dramatic, harking back to her past as an elite and damaged athlete, Cape seeks a raw, direct expression through engagement with the body’s physicality in order to render an instinctual and emotional act of expression.
Working outside in the desert, free from constraints, using unconventional mediums and revelling in their gross materiality, Cape excavates her unconscious in the desire to rip the figure and face wide open. These works are psychological self portraits, voicing the dialogue between the internal and external landscape, and of past and present experience.
The contrast of survival and decay, be it in a desert landscape, in the physical body, or in the mind, is where Cape is searching for what lies between the beauty and the horror that is the exquisite tragedy of the human condition. Offering a theatrical encounter with the spectator in the hope of breaking through language, to touch life.