Sophie Cape, Echoes from the core, 2023. Soil, charcoal, oil, pigment, pastel, and acrylic on Fabriano cotton rag 600gsm, framed, 75 x 105cm. Courtesy: the artist and Olsen, Sydney.

For more than a decade, artist Sophie Cape has poured her emphatic expressions of ancient landscapes onto canvas and paper to tremendous acclaim. It is the tension between two or more things that has come to categorise the artist’s work – whether between the drawn and the written mark, the mind and the body, or the beautiful and the grotesque. At times, all of these dynamics are present at once, offering an encounter with the human condition in all of its power and poetry. Honouring her fondness for the outdoors by working in and with Australia’s bushland and desert settings, Cape’s surfaces diarise the availability of local soil, sand, rust, ash, and charcoal. In recent years, Cape has lived and worked on Dharawal land, amidst coastal acreage on Sydney’s South Coast. This setting has invested new motivations in her work – as she considers the materials now at hand, and the ecosystems from which they come.

Cape found herself besotted with the mediums of painting and drawing during childhood and pursued the techniques of master draftspeople vehemently. Her love of beautiful parchments and deft linework was fostered during this time and inspired her subsequent careers in architecture and calligraphy. Cape’s return to art followed many years working as an elite sportsperson, a period cut short due to injury. In its wake, painting and drawing provided cathartic means to expel the traumas accessioned on the dramatic alpine slopes and sprint tracks that she had begun to call home.

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