Is It Still Raining? Sophia Campbell

Sophia Campbell

Is It Still Raining?

The Irish Architectural Archive,

45 Merrion Square, Dublin D02VY60

14 March - 5 April 2023

Oliver Sears Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Belfast born artist, Sophia Campbell.

A graduate of Ulster University, Sophia Campbell debuts with a solo exhibition at Oliver Sears Gallery which explores the relationship between water, flowers and human beings and how these elements represent memorialisation, immersion and restoration. During the last three years, Campbell has observed the contrasting meaning of water in an age of climate change, mass migration and excess. Similarly, flowers are emblematic of joy, love and loss. Water and flowers feature in her ambiguous, lush and seductive paintings which brush the face of the viewer, ‘we clap at the darkness’. (Carol Ann Duffy 2020).

Campbell intends her paintings to be visually seductive and yet ambiguous. The flower images are drawn from bunches that are often chained to lampposts next to fatal car accidents, a memorial that is found all over the world. The water imagery is a confection of the imagination but relates to climate change and the dissonance between the danger that water presents to mankind and the pleasure it affords. Painting is a medium that the artist uses with great confidence both in mark making and as a colourist.

Since graduating in 2019 with a first class honours degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster, Campbell has exhibited work at the Engine Room Gallery Summer Show, ArtisAnn Gallery Emerging Artists exhibition and was 1 of 13 artists shortlisted to exhibit at the RDS Visual Art Awards in Dublin. She was appointed Graduate Artist-in-Residence for Fine Art painting at Belfast School of Art for the 2019-2020 academic year. Campbell has also featured work in the 136th and 137th Royal Ulster Academy exhibition at the Ulster Museum. She was a contender on the first episode of Sky Arts’ ‘Portrait Artist of the Year 2019’. She recently showed work in The Time of Our Lives exhibition at the Oliver Sears Gallery, The Golden Thread Gallery and Arcade Studios Belfast.

Hands by Dame Carol Ann Duffy

We clap at the darkness.

I hearken for the sound

of my daughter’s small hands,

but she is miles away...

though I can see her hands

when I put my head in my own.