Sophie Derrick - Bold & Fearless

Sophie Derrick’s work very much focuses on portraiture, but with the use
of both painting and photography this genre is skewed and manipulated, and the transformative properties of paint are pushed to the limit.

She photographs the act of painting onto her own skin and then paints on top of the photographs, creating layers of paint and painted images, blurring the boundaries between the two.

There is a constant shift between dualities, painting and photography, absence and presence, and reality and fiction. Sophie Derrick’s work incorporates the two mediums of painting and photography. She has a great interest in the materiality and substance of paint, and execute this interest through photography, creating a juxtaposition of the two mediums.

Using her skin as the canvas, paint is placed sculpturally onto her face, before being rendered flat through digital photography, the image is then re-animated, by thick lashings of paint being applied heavily across the mounted surface.

Sophie Derrick’s practice is founded on self-portraiture, but her blending of sculptural painting and performative photography, successfully transcends any traditional interpretation.