Summary
Entangled Future Scapes Exhaling Through Sky Swimming (Tentacled) Others (2025) imagines a future world where countless species have vanished. The work explores how the Earth might heal and reclaim the non-biodegradable traces of human existence. Jellyfish, survivors of five mass extinction events, embody resilience and mystery, their biology still only partially understood. Within this imagined vertical landscape, tentacled beings, having hybridised through their assimilation with plastic, drift through the sky, serving as the planet's new lungs, cleansing and revitalising the atmosphere to restore the conditions necessary for life.
Sophia's creative practice-led research explores materiality, inter-material relations and sites of material encounter through an anti-colonial lens. It emerges from a growing discomfort with colonial systems, often masked as ‘progressive,’ that continue to enact wide spread structural violence and ecological devastation. Through close attention to the qualities of materials and the relations they form, this research examines how the process of making can come together in sculptural assemblages to critically engage with hegemonic colonialist structures.
A central concern of this research is the historical transformation of materials under human dominion from ecological matter, to valuable commodity and ultimately to worthless waste. It explores how these materials may be revalued for their inherent dynamism, interdependence and temporal depth. Sophia's methodology, aiming to resist hierarchical and binary paradigms, is grounded in reconnection, care and alternative ways of knowing. Through minimal intervention and a sensitivity to material agency and contingent states shaped by natural processes, this creative approach cultivates a way of knowing and relating to the world that has been diminished through Sophia's colonial education.
This research engages with the ethical tensions of being a settler within colonial systems, systems that simultaneously privilege the artist while causing devastating harm to others. By navigating this discomfort, this research project investigates the possibilities of finding non-colonial ways of being in colonially constructed systems.
