Sonja Grieve

My paintings explore movement, transformation, and the inseparable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The process begins with the human figure. Working from life, I paint rapid and sustained poses directly onto prepared canvases, using the brush as a drawing instrument. These gestural traces capture fleeting moments of presence and movement, an accumulation of observation, instinct, and energy rather than a literal representation of the body. From this foundation, the work evolves intuitively. Figures dissolve into imagined terrains: a shoulder becomes a ridgeline, a back a shoreline, a head a distant hill. Bodies merge with water, vegetation, light, and geological forms until the boundaries between figure and landscape become fluid. The paintings are not depictions of specific places, but psychological and emotional terrains where memory, imagination, observation, and instinct intersect. Through layered colour, gestural mark-making, and continual revision, forms shift, merge, disappear, and re-emerge. At the heart of the work is a belief that nothing living exists in isolation. Everything is in a state of becoming, growing, changing, dissolving, and renewing. By transforming the figure into landscape, I explore the porous boundaries between self and environment, presence and absence, and our shared participation in a living world.