ARTIST STATEMENT

Sobia’s work generally derives from ideas of ephemeral beauty and presence in a space. Her starting point for this series of paintings was looking at smoke because of its transitory and ephemeral nature, it solidifies for a few seconds, then it is gone, it occupies a space and yet it doesn't really, so her interest is in space as well, and how a substance can operate in this space, or create an illusionistic space in a painting (thinking also of the idea of the cinema screen and how that creates temporal illusions). From this she began to extract the sort of shapes and forms the smoke creates to create abstract paintings that create and refer to more dynamic spaces and phenomena, such as fire, but without actually painting fire. When creating these shapes and forms the process becomes almost calligraphic, thus the materiality of the paint further adding to these ideas of space and illusion.