Sonia Payes
Woman in Bronze
2019
bronze
2.30 metres (height)
Edition: 3 +AP
This work invites the viewer to explore an internal self-reflection, extending themes of regeneration in an Anthropocene world where humanity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
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‘Woman in Bronze (2019) is the latest piece from Melbourne based artist Sonia Payes: exploring thematic preoccupations of creation, destruction, and transformation, but through a contemporary lens of growing environmental angst.’
‘Hybridity is an integral part of her artistic practice, and over a sixteen-year professional career she has combined her foundational photographic work with digital imagery, 3D technologies, animated film and sculpture.’
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‘ Woman in Bronze, a distillation of humanity, Earth, and personified creation, impotently anticipates its own dissolution. But Payes remains hopeful. The sneaking crack that threatens to tear these conjoined unities apart, to divide one into two, also presents a reproductive multiplication. Bearing the visual DNA of the artist’s family – her daughters Ilana and Janine, and their own children – it conveys a fervent belief in life’s potential for regeneration.’
These lines are taken from an essay that is being published internationally soon, by Daniel Pateman, Freelance Arts Writer, U.K. 2019
