Sophie Mayer (b. 1980) is an artist living and working in Berlin. Throughout her practice, Mayer pursues an incisive exploration of the South African coal mining history combining both the personal and the political through the construction of speculative cosmologies of space, time and matter. Through research methods combining theory, painting and installation, Mayer looks to uncover the embodied realities of the subterranean and how they fuse to form speculative trans-material spaces and hybrid landscapes. Her practice is an on-going set of field experiments and wormholes into Queer Carbon, bending the terrestrial and ecological into the cosmological. The meeting of the private with the historic and the geologic becomes an articulation of ecological resistance.

Mayer received a Bachelor of Arts from University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and completed a Masters in Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths University in London.

In the picture is the Enyati Colliery (1914, South Africa) -4-8-2 steam locomotive transporting coal. The Enyati Railway in the Hlobane district of northern KwaZulu/Natal was a joint service provider for several collieries in the area, some providing their own motive power, while others relied on Enyati pooled stock. In its early years, it was operated by Stafford Mayer, a Mauritian Merchant and Trading company founded by my Paternal Grandfather Lindsay Georges Maurice Mayer, who was born in 1904 in Rivière Sèche, Mauritius.