/Sophie Sundaram
Sophie Sundaram
College of the Holy Cross, 2026, Studio Art
Thirteen Ways
charcoal and eraser on paper
57″ x 57″
2024
“Thirteen Ways” is an installation inspired by American modernist poet Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. The piece is composed of thirteen individual charcoal drawings. Each is a highly cropped image of a taxidermied blackbird or one of my own body parts. The central panel brings my body together with the bird’s, exploring the illusionism of visual experiences, as it depicts my hand forming a bird-shaped puppet shadow. “Thirteen Ways” explores the defamiliarizing effects of close observation, suggests a shared humanity of animals and humans, and pays homage to Stevens’ meditation on the subjectivity of visual experience.
Sophie Sundaram
College of the Holy Cross, 2026, Studio Art
Map of the Heart
graphite on paper
44″ x 31″
2023
“Map of the Heart” explores themes of complex personal identity, immigration, and the concept of home. The piece depicts an image of myself within an anatomical heart, through which run not veins, but the streets of all the places with which I hold deep emotional ties. My image becomes one with my homes, as it blends into the increasingly dense network of maps. Warsaw, Poland, my mother’s hometown, is at the heart of the piece, reflecting a maternal embrace of streets that form a cage for my body, while the placement of other regions suggest strong, though less visceral bonds.