Sophie Cape is a Sydney-based painter who graduated from the National Art School in Sydney in 2011.
Prior to her art career, Cape was a distinguished athlete in both downhill skiing and sprint cycling for Australia. After years of sport-related injuries, she redirected her focus into art.
Cape creates her works by taking canvases into the landscape and working directly on the ground, exposing both herself and the artwork to weather, dirt, water and other natural forces.
The landscape is both subject and collaborator. Rain, mud, fire, erosion and physical movement become part of the process rather than things she merely represents.
Much the same way an athlete would she puts her whole body into the process rather than treating painting as a purely intellectual activity.
Working outside with the elements, free from constraints, using unconventional mediums and reveling in their gross materiality, her works oscillate between abstraction and figuration.
Her paintings are often described as psychological self-portraits, voicing the dialogue between the internal and external landscape, and of past and present experience.
Sophie Cape has held multiple solo exhibitions and won art prizes, including the Hadley's Art Prize, the Portia Geach and the Paddington Art Prize.
She has been awarded residencies in Paris, Rome, Austria, Poland, Hong Kong, China, Italy, and throughout Australia.
In 2020, she was featured on Australian Story.
