Sophie cox

Sophie Cox, Overheard in the city, 2018, linen, thread, embroidery hoops, wallpaper, plastic plants, wooden bench, image by Kim Nguyen

A stranger utters a phrase. An artist records it. The stranger walks on. The artist carefully embroiders the phrase into linen and displays it for others to consider.

This is the process of the work, Overheard in the City. Phrases are gleaned as Cox passes through the streets of Sydney and transformed into embroidered works. These pieces, or samplers as they are known, connect to a long history of stitching and its feminine connotations. In collecting the phrases, Cox acts as a contemporary flaneur, an urban wanderer, moving through the city streets practicing what the avant-garde group Situationist International called the dérive. The phrases are chosen for their often-unintentional humour, fitting with her belief in humour as a strategy through which social issues can be considered. Phrases such as ‘security can’t tell if you’re pissing in the pool,’ and ‘strutting about like a silverback gorilla,’ are intended to be comic, but also poetic. Each phrase is a fragment of found poetry. A found poem is made up of words collected from a variety of sources including newspapers and books. Each stitched piece is complemented by the brick wallpaper, printed from a photograph. The bricks are accentuated by ferns and a park bench, alluding to the cityscape which the phrases come from.

The pace of the stitching, the slow push-pull of the thread through linen contrasts with the space from which each phrase was collected. The fragments of speech were gathered in the city, a space of frenetic pace, and constant movement. As Cox passed through the city collecting words from strangers it was as though she was on a conveyor belt, gathering what she needs from fragmented speech before moving on. Back in the studio the speed is slow. The process is careful and labour-intensive. Stitches are counted, thread cut into lengths, needles threaded. The blunt-ended needle tugs its way through the thick linen, forming crosses as it goes back and forth.This is the process of cross-stitch, of forming words and suspending sentence fragments onto fabric, of reframing and catching strangers’ sentences and working them onto cloth.

Sophie Cox, detail Overheard in the City, linen, thread, embroidery hoops, wallpaper, plastic plants, wooden bench, image by Kim Nguyen

Sophie Cox, detail Overheard in the City, linen, thread, embroidery hoops, wallpaper, plastic plants, wooden bench, image by Kim Nguyen

Sophie Cox, detail from Worthy sayings for good children, 2017, embroidery hoops, linen, thread, vintage chairs, image by Sophie Cox

‘Worthy sayings for good children’ was inspired by two overheard phrases; ‘Elsie, do you want to be taken by a strange man?’ and ‘I hope you’ve been good, there are cameras here,’ both said to small children. Cox was drawn to these phrases firstly for their unintentional humour, and also for what they say about modern society. The fear that underlies each statement, and the sense of a surveillance culture, where children are in danger, intrigued me. The sense that children must behave or something terrible will occur also interested her. The intensity of these statements, spoken with such seriousness, made them somehow humourous. The use of cross-stitch was inspired by samplers, where cross-stitch was used to create moral phrases and statements that were made by children to inspire good behaviour. Her work is a modern equivalent of these samplers, using phrases intended to bring about good behaviour in children. The phrases are displayed with two wooden children’s chairs, both a vintage throwback that references the historical nature of cross-stitch as well as alluding to the children that are the recipients of these statements.

Sophie Cox, Worthy sayings for good children, 2017, embroidery hoops, linen, thread, vintage chairs

Part of this work featured in the 2018 Electrofringe Festival held in Sydney at 107 Projects.

Sophie Cox, In memories light, 2017, album, photographs, wooden shelf, table, poetry. Image by Sophie Cox

When recalling a memory there is often a moment of light, that fills the minds eye as the moment is brought back from the memory store. It is this light, that haziness of memories that Cox wanted to capture in this work. A trio of Polaroid-style photographs, accompanied by a poem, make up each page. The photographs, through their light-flooded nature, echo the washed-out quality of memories. Each spread is of a place of significance to the artist, somewhere that she has memories about, from her childhood street to the park she grew up playing in. It is a nostalgic document, an attempt to clutch at the impossibility of places remaining the same.

Sophie Cox, detail of In memories light, 2017, album, photographs, wooden shelf, table, image by Sophie Cox

Sophie Cox, detail of In memories light, 2017, album, photographs, wooden shelf, table

Sophie Cox, Language of the street, 2017, digital collage, Image by Sophie Cox

There is a language known only to construction workers. Lines of spray paint in lurid colours, cryptic numbers, and words like TBANK and BDC, amongst arrows and dots. These mysterious markings, hieroglyphs of a modern era, are intriguing. The work ‘Language of the Street’, aims to catalogue some of these symbols and to shed light on their aesthetics, the way in which they evoke abstract paintings or collages. It also follows with the artists’ preoccupation with the everyday, and the poetry that can be found in the seemingly ordinary parts of life.

Sophie Cox, Into the blue: a jellyfish elegy, 2018, archival photographic print on pearlescent paper, Image by Sophie Cox

Mortal jellyfish, photographed as they beach on the coast, their gelatinous bodies devoid of life, yet still moved by the constancy of the waves. Unlike the turritoptis dohrniii, their immortal cousins, these jellyfish cannot rejuvenate. The immortal jellyfish can transform from a fully-developed adult to a polyp and begin life again if their life is threatened. But this species photographed, the Blue Blubber, or Catostylus mosaicus- is not fated to spend eternity floating through the oceans. Instead it is time is short.

These jellyfish washed up, gifts from the unknowable ocean, and were inspired by the beautiful, ethereal photographs of jellyfish taken by masterful photographer, Brett Weston, who so wisely stated in an interview that ‘Nature is a great artist. The greatest.’

Sophie Cox, installation shot of Into the blue: a jellyfish elegy, 2018, archival photographs on pearlescent paper, image by Kim Nguyen

The series Into the blue: a jellyfish elegy was exhibited at Dedspace Gallery in 2018 in Sydney’s Inner West.

Sophie Cox, installation shot of Into the blue: a jellyfish elegy, 2018, archival photographs on pearlescent paper, image by Kim Nguyen

Sophie Cox, detail from Classification to chaos, 2017, wooden drawer, polymer clay, acrylic paint, image by Sophie Cox

Museums have long been a place where humans have attempted to classify the multitude of objects and organisms that make up our universe. From the cabinet of curiosities of Renaissance times, to the first recognisable museum of natural history; The Musee National d’Histoire Naturelle, which opened in Paris in 1635, categorising has been a way in which humans have made order from the disarray.

The work, ‘Classification to Chaos’ is inspired by the museum and its notions of organisation and control. This is exemplified through the collection of beetles in their neat, ordered rows. These specimens, reminiscent of real beetles, are arranged in the typical fashion in categorised boxes. Accompanying them is the museum catalogue, charting each beetle, a document of scientific order.

Inside the darkened room, however, the beetles are escaping, crawling out of their controlled domain, swarming radioactively. The contrast between the two spaces is marked- the light; suggesting knowledge and the known, to the dark; symbolic of the unknown, the future, uncertainty. This futuristic landscape conveys the force of nature, as they flee from the human world, whose experimentation and environmental fallout has given them a luminescent glow.

Sophie Cox, detail of Classification to chaos, 2018, polymer clay, ultraviolet light, image by Sophie Cox

Sophie Cox, Japanese Bowls from the series Domestic Grids, 2014-, postcards, watercolour paper, balsa wood, glue

Sophie Cox, Milk Jugs from the series Domestic Grids, 2014-, postcards, watercolour paper, balsa wood, glue

Domestic grids is an ongoing series of paper cut-outs made from vintage postcards. The work deals with the tension between the public and the private, the outdoor world and the home. This occurs through combining of the public spaces depicted on the postcards with the private, domestic shapes that each card is cut into. Interwoven into the works are postcards with visible writing, suggestive of stories and tales written and sent in the cards’ history.

Each domestic shape is arranged in a grid formation reminiscent of the museum classification system. Through this the familiar, domestic objects are elevated from the ordinary object to the artefact, suggesting the importance of the everyday.

Sophie Cox, Greyscale Lamps from the series Domestic Grids, 2014-, postcards, watercolour paper, balsa wood, glue

Sophie Cox, detail from Patchwork Museum, 2014, archival photograph, Image by Sophie Cox

Collections hold memories, moments and places within them. ‘Patchwork Museum’ aims to condense these ideas into one space that encompasses the artists’ history of collecting. Collections have a familial history for Cox, who hails from a long line of collectors. The collection also holds an important place in the museological history of art and the classification of artefacts. bringing objects that are seen as ordinary and familiar and elevating them to the status of that of a museum object through the use of the grid, the artist aims to question the place of the common, domestic object in the art world.

Sophie Cox, Patchwork Museum, 2014, archival photographs, found objects, printed and appliqued tea towels, collaged paper, wooden boxes, image by Sophie Cox

Part of Patchwork Museum was exhibited in the Christensen Heller Gallery in Oakland, California in 2014

Sophie Cox, Looking out, Stepping in , 2015, gelatin silver pinhole photographs, Image by Sophie Cox

Like many aspects of pinhole photography, the concept for this series came about by chance. Cox propped a magazine up against a box and photographed it. When developed, the magazine had transformed to appear like a doorway to another world. This prompted and exploration into the way in which this could be incorporated into photographs, using layering through dodging and burning and digital negatives. The doors and windows act as a metaphor for the camera itself, and its ability to provide us with a view onto another world. We look into these other worlds through the photograph, whilst simultaneously stepping out of our own. The landscapes photographed transform everyday gardens and buildings into mysterious places, worlds of miniature people and hidden lands, with the doors and windows leading the viewer into this space. There is something almost magical about old-fashioned photographic techniques, and the works evoke this sense of mystery and fantasy, that feeling of amazement when the photograph comes hazily to appear in the darkroom’s developer.