/// ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION
ArtsWorcester East Gallery
May 9 through June 16, 2024
Public Reception: Friday, May 10, 6:00-9:00 PM /// DETAILS
Sophie Pearson’s first solo exhibition, Beneath the Memory, tells a powerful story of trauma and ongoing recovery through a series of oil and pastel self-portraits. The paintings that depict a younger Pearson began with a tub of childhood photographs of the artist and her caretakers. Pearson reproduces these snapshots through an adult lens that explores the complicated emotions linked to a child's experience in an abusive home. The adults are blocked out by colors rich with emotional associations: the artist’s mother with blue, representing her sadness and solemnity, and the artist’s father with red, denoting his passion and anger.
Pearson explains that her inner child—five, ten, fifteen-year-old Sophie—“comes to play” and scribbles over the paintings with pastels. Remembering feelings of shame or pain, she marks her own face and the faces of caretakers with frowns, jagged hair, and chaotic scribbles. At other times, she remembers the warmth and light, adding a sun to the corner or a heart for her Mommy and Daddy. These paintings simultaneously depict the distortion of traumatic memories built in youth while reclaiming and validating the complicated, and often conflicting, emotions one can hold during and after those moments.
The childhood paintings lead into self-portraits of adolescence and adulthood. In these portraits, we see battles of the mind and body. We also see remnants of the reds and blues– the marks of childhood following us through time in the form of tarnished memories and insecurities.
“With my art, I aim to create healing for myself,” says Pearson, “and in doing so, whoever else may need it.”
Sophie Pearson is an oil painter, currently living in Worcester, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Lesley University in 2021. She has previously exhibited work in group exhibitions at the Cambridge Art Association, the Piano Craft Gallery, and ArtsWorcester, among others.
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