“A sense of alchemy an air of enigmatic mystery and transformative power – has always been an element of Payes’ eclectic output.” (Daniel Pateman - UK Arts Writer)
Themes of the cycle of life and humanity's ambivalent relationship to the environment fuse together in Sonia Payes’s recent works. Initially true to the process of capturing her world solely through a camera lens, the images of her daughter on which these current works are based beautifully and evocatively describe emergence and revelation.
Transforming her daughter’s facial likeness into what Daniel Pateman calls, “a digital avatar that became the defining motif of her practice: repeated, de-individualised, and integrated within virtual and physical land & seascapes.” In fact, Payes’s most alchemical gesture is to elevate the human individual to a transcendent plane: making her images represent an abstract, universal principle of perpetual creation.
Like much of her work it is personal, deeply personal, involving family and rooted in direct experience, but like all significant art the series transcends its origins to address universal concerns.
These apocalyptic readings underscore the complexity of Payes’s project to both document the impact of human intervention on the planet — the land, sea and sky — and to provide a vision of possible futures.
Hybridity is an integral part of her 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. As she explains “Humanity is in constant interaction with the environment. The two cannot be separated.”
