Sophie Lisa Beresforsd

About

Sophie Lisa Beresford’s work intertwines pantheism, feminism, mysticism, and localism as part of a highly personal vision of how to we can make the world a better place through the power of art. She espouses the idea of liberation, trying to expand our consciousness and our social conscience.

Her pair of new exhibitions reveal a brand newly commissioned series of seven monumental photographs. Each is a tableau showing her in a shamanistic persona in a location connected to her place of birth, and spiritual rebirth. The series spans places that are beautiful and brutal, with each treated equally as a space of potential transformation and becoming. Each exhibition is also framed by cloudscape murals that lull us into a sense of serenity – at least momentarily.

Beresford’s aims are those of the great 1960s and 1970s performance artists: to emancipate our minds, bodies and our social body alike. She suggests that ideals are, now, the most uncomfortable and unfashionable ideas of all. She also suggests that the true story of modern art from William Blake to Beuys is of artists working both to expand the horizons of both our consciousness – and of our social conscience. Modern art is and must be immune to insincerity, though not irony. In her new works, it is as though she is channeling Blake and Beuys along with Carole Schneemann, and Valie EXPORT to reignite the true flame of modern art. Beresford proposes that the 1960s ethos of liberation – a quaint, forgotten, almost laughable notion – has finally found its time. A time, that is, when art is owned by and made for billionaires; and when socio-economic and gender inequalities are mistaken for eternal realities instead of mind-forged manacles.

Beresford has exhibited internationally including at VeSch, Vienna; Abrons Art Center, New York; NADA Art Fair Miami; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, and the Laing Art Gallery where she is also represented in the permanent collection. She was awarded ‘Artist Newcomer of the Year’ in The Journal Culture Awards 2010.

The exhibitions are part of the three-year project ‘Happiness is a New Idea’ that celebrates the fact that every visit to a library or gallery can plant the seed of a new idea in our minds. Libraries and galleries are, arguably, the greatest civic inheritance bequeathed to us by our Victorian predecessors. Both are free and for everyone – and, now, under immediate threat. Both types of civic space offer the chance to learn about other ideas and beliefs, and are the only spaces in cities that ask nothing of us except our imagination.