Artist Profile — Chanel Sohier
Chanel Sohier is a Sicilian-Australian artist based in Sydney, NSW. She graduated from University of NSW Art and Design in 2014 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a Major in Painting and Drawing.
Her work explores the relationship between technical elements of painting, focusing on the interaction between abstraction and the perception of the viewer. Utilising the landscape as an anchor point, Chanel’s artworks invite the viewer to explore the visceral elements of colour and mark-making within a composition.
Her influences include American Modernism and the Metaphysical Art painters whose works are richly academic yet deeply felt. Chanel’s work has been exhibited in Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, and on the Central Coast since 2010.
This series of works is an ongoing and developing investigation of the poetic potential of composition, mark-making and colouration. Each work explores the deeply felt nature of emotion, utilising a constructed landscape to give form to esoteric and complex feelings. Each work is approached like a poem – curated – from the endless possibility of choices to hew an artefact for contemplation.
“A small-scale artwork invites you to move closer; it is humble in nature. Scale in relation to the body is an important aspect of partaking in the experience of art. Small-scale artworks share our living spaces quietly and meaningfully. The miniature series of poetic landscapes explores expansive and quiet moments of contemplation, compacted. Each artwork begins without underdrawing or reference, it is impromptu like a written letter. Each work is made in a flow state where decisions are tactical and consumed by the rhythm of painting; the artworks aim to translate a state of mind and a cohesion between body and mind.” - Chanel Sohier
