'But what happens if I get lost?'

Sophia Ainslie on crafting "Woven 12" and "Woven 13" at Gallery NAGA

Sophia Ainslie, Woven 13. Flashe paint, sand and archival digital print on paper. 38.25” x 27”. 2025. Photo Julia Featheringill.

“Artists, what happens when creativity leaves? How do you manage blocks?”

I posted that question on social media in July, 2024.

“This question comes at a serendipitous moment,” wrote Sophia Ainslie. “I’m there right now, standing in front of a huge creative block. … But I’m in a magical environment (west coast of Ireland) and my studio is faithfully waiting. I know I have been here – lost – before and just need to begin. …I’ve filled my studio with stuff–things I find, like wire, tools, rocks, I’ve printed out images on xerox paper and a large format printer. I’ve gathered other people’s thrown out paint, inks, tools. Then I hung up 8 sheets of 2’x3’ paper that I’m putting paint onto without judgment. One layer each paper. Then another layer in each paper. I’m trying to be in the moment. I’m trying to have faith in process, I’m using my body, mixing colors, applying paint in new ways. Every day I come and look, maybe cut, and make marks. I’m giving myself time and remembering wise words from a South African man I once met out in the wilderness when I was all alone. I asked him, ‘But what happens if I get lost?’ He looked at me with such confusion and responded, ‘How can you be lost? You will always be here.’”

Sophia found her way to the mysterious here, and the fruit of those efforts are now on display in her painting show Woven at Gallery NAGA through Sept. 27. I haven’t yet seen the exhibition, but I know it’s a leap from her last extensive body of work around medical imaging. A relentless search for the intersection of taut formal tensions and the nebulousness of the deep unknown seems always at the center of her practice.

Below, Sophia describes her sources – weather, natural patterns, bodily experience, archival prints of meaningful artifacts, premixed paints – all of which she tosses into what she calls “the compost of my being.” She follows that with patience and tinkering as she waits to see what springs from the rich loam of that compost. The tinkering involves an eye for those formal tensions, a search for problems to complicate the imagery, and a practice of dislocation and relocation that reflects her innate sense, as an immigrant from South Africa, of the unseen imprints of movement.

Maybe she calls these works “Woven” because there’s so much happenstance, wisdom, and compost knotted into their tapestries – or maybe because, looping and flowing with skeins of color, they seem to nod to textiles. Either way, Sophia’s paintings become imprints of her own unseen movements: the questions of new environments and new bodies of work, the resolutions of familiar materials and practices, the ongoing dance between the material and the unknown.

Sophia writes: