Sophia Flood: Sun and its Living Shadow

Sophia Flood’s works explore how the passage of time is both experienced by the body and made visible on a landscape. Late afternoon sunlight refracted on her studio floor, for example, or the space under a giant tree outside its door are moments embedded within her paintings, both in form and in feeling. This source material roots Flood’s paintings in the physical world even as it is abstracted and obscured. 

Turning an image over in her head, Flood works the canvas in search of forms associated with a core, embodied memory. Shapes and marks emerge as she slowly builds up and removes material. Past iterations of the painting reappear through her often subtractive process, helping to guide its evolution. As subtle shifts in color and texture convey the painting’s many stages, time is compressed into a rich, variegated surface. 

Once completed, these layered, tactile images are at once solid and fleeting, occupying both positive and negative space. In Intertidal, Flood recalls a labyrinthine salt marsh riverbank at low tide. Using dry, opaque blue and clay- colored marks that weave in and out of linear blue stains, she conjures a subterranean world that is constantly shifting.