Sophia AInslie

Sophia Ainslie is a South African American contemporary artist working between drawing and painting.

Her work focuses on the connection between diagnostic imaging technologies and landscape, interior and exterior, and the microscopic and macroscopic. She melds observation with imagination resulting in a relationship of connections and disconnections between black mark making and flat color, stillness of shape and active mark, movement and space. Actively pushing the formal aspects present in the work, she is interested in making the negative shapes prominent – creating spaces/places that look like something was once there, but is no longer.

Her journey overseas was instigated by a series of sponsored opportunities to attend workshops and residencies in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Hamlyn Foundation and the African Arts Trust sponsored her residency at the Gasworks in London, which led to an invitation to paint for a year in San Francisco at Yosemite Place. Having time to focus, and being in a new landscape, opened up new areas in her work. The need to have more of these experiences brought her to Boston to finish her studies.

Ainslie received her MFA in Boston, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in 2001 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Ainslie is a recipient of the Ann and Graham Gund award, the Inaugural Hendricks Art Fund for Tufts Graduates, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Painting, and the Artist’s Resource Trust. Ainslie lectures at Northeastern University in Boston.

“I'm interested in forming a collage-like space that reflects the relationship between the body and landscape as interconnected and parallel experiences. Drawing becomes a tool where observation and imagination intersect, resulting in a relationship of connections and disconnections between inside and outside or absence and presence.” - Sophia Ainslie