Sonia Payes

Sonia Payes – a multi-disciplinary artist creating photography, sculpture, video and installation examining the intersections between landscape and the body, the feminine and the natural.

Sonia Payes is confronting the challenge of restoring balance to our relationship with our host planet. Bringing together her photographic works, and the sculptural work that has developed from it, she documents the impact of human intervention on the planet and provides a vision of a possible future.

Hybridity is an integral part of Payes’s artistic practice, and over her professional career, she has combined her foundational photographic work with digital imagery, 3D technologies, animated film, and sculpture. In this exhibition, she continues to blur categorical distinctions, bringing together her photographic works and the sculptural work that has developed from it as a way of interrogating these key questions confronting the human species.

Initially true to the process of capturing her world solely through a camera lens, the images of her daughter Ilona re-emerge in her new works to explore the theme of humanity’s responsibility to protect our planet. Payes transforms her daughter’s facial likeness into what Daniel Pateman calls “a digital avatar” who stands in for all of us as we undertake the process of reintegration and re-engagement with our planet. Emerging from the ocean, the sky and a variety of verdant landscapes, her haunting image speaks eloquently of our plight while offering hope for a re-imagined future.

Sculpture

Woman
Payes’ multi-directional faces, arise to greater heights from out the earth, perceiving 360 degrees of horizon expressing the omnipresence and immanence of deified nature. “A humanizing focus within the theme of regeneration is my recurring focus of a portrait image of my daughter, Ilana – an iconic element that in certain works morphs into a four-faced warrior or in others, becomes a hybrid automaton of the future.”

Emergence

Payes continues to explore the entwined relationship between mankind and nature with surreal Emergence sculpture.

“The tough metal bronze inverted faces demonstrate a stoic adaptability to change, personifying humanity’s innate connection to the natural world, the impact human-induced global warming is having on the environment and to further elucidate the concerns underpinning Payes’s art: those of perpetual change, the reciprocity between all living beings, nature’s regenerative cycles, and a faith in humanity’s ability to adapt to environmental upheaval.”