Sophia Ainslie: Woven
Launches Fall Season for Boston's Gallery NAGA
By: NAGA - Aug 19, 2025
Sophia Ainslie: Woven
Gallery NAGA
67 Newbury St Boston, MA
02116-3010
On View: September 2 - 27 2025
Reception: Saturday, September 6, 1 – 3pm
Artist remarks at 2pm.
The South African born artist, Sophia Ainslie, has been a productive and ever evolving abstract artist for many years. She launches the fall season for Boston’s Gallery NAGA with the exhibition Woven.
What follows is her artist’s statement.
WOVEN
My paintings arrive slowly, built through layering - a process of searching and discovering something new and unknown. Repetition and accumulation - of line, mark and color - create rhythm, structure, and a sense of time, carrying a history of previous decisions and revisions. That history remains partially visible, shaping the final face of the painting and building its anatomy.
I often think about maps: weather patterns, topographies, shifting terrains. I’m intrigued by how they register change, trace movement, and reveal what’s usually unseen. That sense of constant motion - of systems unfolding over time and space - feels deeply connected to the evolution of a painting.
I work predominantly in acrylic and Flashe paint on paper, sometimes mixing sand into the paint - collected from the landscape - adding texture and grounding the work in physical place. In certain instances, I collage photographic fragments - images of beadwork and fabric from South Africa and the United States. They come from my collection of inherited and domestic textiles that are part of my everyday life. I cut the images in ways that abstract them, removing context and disrupting the original meaning. Some fragments integrate quietly into their new environment, barely distinguishable from the painted surface. Others remain separate, creating tension or surprise and contrasting against their new surroundings. This sense of dislocation - of parts removed from one place and absorbed into another - opens new relationships, a new way of coexisting.
The work lives between abstraction and representation, woven from personal and cultural threads. I am interested in hybridity - how different visual languages can inhabit the same space. There is friction, but also connection. The paintings become a weaving of self and story, an attempt to make sense through making form, the experience of being shaped by multiple places and the ongoing search for coherence in layered identities. Painting is a way of holding and creating space - for memory, movement, displacement and belonging, and the questions that come with trying to feel at home in the world.