IDA SOPHIA

Resident November 2023

Ida Sophia (1989) is a performance artist with a hybrid media, sculpture and installation practice that draws on the body to render performative works in various materials. Beginning with personal narratives, Ida’s work is characterised by conceptual examinations of widely shared, uncomfortable human experiences such as hope, regret, familial tension and grief. Ultimately, the works construct a capacity to accept, understand and process pain within our faculty of reason, will and belief.

Ida has been awarded prizes including the prestigious Ramsay Art Prize (2023), Emerging Artist of The Year award (2021) and Centre for Creative Health Award (2021) and has been featured on the television show ABC Artworks (2021, 2023) and ABC Radio National (2023).

Ida has exhibited widely in Australia and Europe including: The Art Gallery of South Australia (Aus, 2023), Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (Aus, 2023) Seventh Gallery (Aus, 2023), Performance Space, (Aus, 2022), Floating Goose Studios (2021), The Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy, 2020), Sofia Art Week (Bulgaria, 2020), Æther (Bulgaria 2019), Collective Haunt Gallery (Aus, 2019) and ACU Gallery (Aus, 2019).

At Domus, Ida collated the research she had gathered over the previous two months. During that time, she traveled across Europe and the UK, working one-on-one with performance artists in Finland, Germany, and Greece to understand and practice different methods of performance art. While in the UK, she spent time at the British Library and The Live Art Development Agency, continuing her research on performance art 'liveness.' She asked, "How close can a secondary audience access a Performance Art work when its relics are restaged at a later date?" Through this provocation, she was developing artist-led strategies, linguistic shifts, and unorthodox archival methods for performance art and its remaining tangible and intangible relics.

In addition, Ida continued developing her long-term performance series, "Hope Dies Last," drawing, researching, and testing actions and materials. The series concerned how representational pain in art can serve as a vehicle to approach our own pain and how we might deal with it. Themes included self-deception, escapism, expectation, promise, yearning, obsession, vanity, and resignation.

She also collaborated with her husband, sound artist Joseph James Francis, to realize sound works accompanying the performances through field recordings collected in Galatina. Joseph James Francis, a Maltese-Australian sound artist, was interested in the architecture of sound and its interaction with place, investigating how traditions inform and influence a society. In Galatina, he researched the sonic intersection between religious heritage, La Taranta, and Italian Futurism.