Sophia Anderson

Sophia Anderson is a member of the Shoalwater Bay tribe, and grew up on the reservation, located on a rural corner of the Pacific coast. Her work is inspired by the transition from her traditional land and tribal community to an endless search for a home in the city. Her creative process is how she renegotiates the intersections of her changing identity. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Evergreen State College, and currently resides in Seattle, Washington.

Sophia Anderson paints primarily on watercolor paper, but also works with found materials such as wood panels salvaged from the beach she grew up on. She paints from life, or from photographs of her ancestors. She is inspired by the relationships between trauma and genealogical, personal and geographical history. She works in series and is inspired by the rhythm of repetition and finds a meditation in mundanity. Painting is a spiritual and therapeutic act for her; her most recent body of work was a series of 100 paintings completed between February 2020 and January 2021. Each of the 100 paintings is of a horse and the series functions as a diary with each painting a separate entry. She calls her current series of still-life ink paintings, “inkscapes”. These paintings function as portraits of a moment in time interacting with the space it inhabits. These paintings are like visual and gestural poems that lionize the overlooked corners of life.