ABOUT SOPHIE DARTFORD

I am a multi-disciplinary artist living between Staffordshire and London, exploring a practice spanning across painting, sculpture, film and the written word. I am currently training to become a teacher of Art & Design to hopefully inspire more artists of diverse experience to find their way in the industry.

Over the past few years I have been working with Rethink Mental Illness, bringing the healing power of the visual arts and creative writing to some of the most vulnerable members of our communities and helping them to find their voice.

My personal practice, which dominates this website, is confessional and confrontational, vulnerable and polemic, particularly when drawing upon past experiences of childhood trauma and the inherent class disparity that exists with in art institutions.

The personal as the political is an especially powerful statement for women to make in art. Everything represented is an admission of my own experiences. The only voyeur present is myself through the constant re-documentation of past experience.

In the process of creation I am withholding information. Faceless faces and unsure actions creating a shadowed narrative through abstraction and sound scapes. When working so vulnerably with memories and trauma an automatic editing and distance is generated. Offloading straight on to the walls disrupting the institutional space to mirror the disruption in my domestic environments and my dissatisfaction towards the class war that is “Art Life”.

The use of relatively accessible materials is increasingly important, being an artist in this exuberantly pricey financial climate, it’s serendipity that my art requires everything to be watered down within an inch of its life.

Paint is catharsis, a soothing development of ideas, a process that allows me to settle and understand the undercurrent of tensions at hand. Film is a deliberate and decisive culmination of the painting practice whilst digital painting is an accumulation of both effects. Pottery is the connection to my routes and poetry creates another layer of ambiguity, an obtuse exhibition of my ideas in literary form.