Sophie Ruigrok

Appropriating the scale, palette and gleam of religious icon paintings, Sophie Ruigrok’s practice investigates how the spiritual and the everyday both reflect and rub up against each other. Her practice invites the viewer to confront a world in which ecstasy appears not as an altered state, but as the simple intensification of our lived experience. 

Subjects are drawn from a wide range of sources including film stills, found photographs, stock images and appropriations from art history, which are then fused together with Ruigrok’s own autobiographical encounters and staged photographs. The resulting images are fragments from the past, present and the imagined, coalesced into non-linear narratives in which the repetition of motifs become increasingly refracted within the dream logic they occupy. Hands appear and reappear, preoccupied with a game of Cat’s Cradle or gutting a fish; open mouths reference Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, transforming states of religious adoration into contemporary modes of pleasure, anguish or consumption. Clouds, masks and tears - symbols with inherent shape-shifting qualities -  act as mediators between the interior and exterior world.

Both the inherent ethereal quality of the pastels she uses and her ability to construct networks of images allow for dreamlike sequences to play out – scales, emotions, and a sense of time and place undulate in heightened states of both euphoria and melancholia. Grounded in the artist’s interest in Jungian psychoanalysis and concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, Ruigrok creates work that, above all, investigates human emotion and its expression through the body.