Finding inspiration in geological history and her personal experiences of new landscapes, Sophie’s works explores the boundaries of landscape painting.
By hand mixing paint with other liquids to create substances with varying consistencies and pouring them onto a range of unevenly treated surfaces, Sophie is challenging what constitutes the medium of paint and the method of its application.
Viewers are invited to observe how the substances conflict and repel, mimicking the movements of tectonic plates driven by convection currents; but also how some merge and dissipate echoing the alluvial flow of water over the earth’s surface.
The progressive flux of the painting is derivative of the landscape’s ceaseless transformation; when the work eventually dries, the strata of paint forms a physical history of itself, akin to the layers of geological history visible in rock formations. Processes are both the detail and the substance of Elliott’s work.
All photos in this post come from the South Square Gallery Joan Day Bursary Exhibition 2012. The Joan Day Bursary is an annual award in tribute to the memory of the highly skilled painter, Joan Day, who lived and worked in Yorkshire for much of her life. South Square Gallery offers this bursary to support promising emerging painters, inviting them to produce new work for a solo exhibition in the gallery.
