Sophie Alexandra Mayer
Artist Biography
Sophie Mayer (b. 1980) paints with the bones of the land. Born in Bristol, raised in Johannesburg and based in an abandoned Victorian Walled Garden in Devon, UK.
Mayer pursues an incisive exploration into systems and relationships that comprise histories of power, extraction and geology. Her practice seeks to highlight resilience and defiance against familial toxic mineral legacies combining both the personal and the political: opening the field to discuss the speculative ecologies of mine-dumps, queer coal and bio-remediation as an act of decolonisation.
Through research methods combining theory, painting and installation, Mayer looks to uncover the embodied realities of the haunted past and how they fuse to form alternative cosmologies of space, time and matter. The meeting of the private with the historic and the geologic becomes an articulation of ecological resistance.
The work begins with a gesture — a mark made without reason or restraint.
This first act, unconscious and abstract, is the beginning of a motion that unfolds across the surface of the painting - recalling Lucretius’ idea of the clinamen — the unpredictable swerve that animates inert atoms and sets the world in motion.
From this initial black mark, the painting evolves through layers of material ghosts: of pigment, of time, of decision and doubt. It is a process of concealment and revelation, of building and undoing, literally anthropogenic waste as “matter out of place.”
Working with earth pigments and anthracite, materials heavy with geological and historical weight. These are not just colours, but deposits of time — the residue of the land, of history, and of extraction. Her art grapples with the historical record and the way the past continues to shape the present. The minerals in the earth’s depths mirror her own gestures on the canvas — not to extract value, but to uncover meaning, to reveal what lies buried in the sediment of memory and form.
How do historical trauma and memory affect national consciousness?
I paint to remember.
To summon.
To listen to the land and what it is trying to tell us.
Excavation is both method and metaphor.
I scrape, I strip,
I remove layers of paint to expose what came before —
earlier gestures, lost decisions, hidden truths.
Each act of removal becomes a re-encounter with the past.
In this way, the work does not move
forward in a linear sense but - oscillates, shifts,
like strata folding into one another.
It is a tactile ontology of time — felt, pressed, and pulled.
- Sophie Mayer
These paintings are not representations but grounding events — accumulations of movement, matter, memory. They resist resolution. They are spaces where motion is sped up, intuitive, responsive - then paused and questioned. Mayer’s practice creates space for ambiguity and complexity, resisting easy answers.
What lost memory could these paintings resurrect through pigment and form?
Mayer received a Bachelor of Arts (2002) from University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and completed a Masters in Art and Ecology (2022) with distinction at Goldsmiths University in London.
In 2025 she attended the twelve-monthly Porthmeor Programme in Painting at St Ives in Cornwall. The Grade II* Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall are probably the most iconic artists’ studios in the country. They are the oldest and have hosted some of the most illustrious artists working in Britain, including Julius Olsson, Virginia Woolf, Sandra Blow, Frances Hodgkins, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.