Sophie Chapman is an interdisciplinary artist and organiser from Newcastle, living and working in London. She makes experimental performance, drawing, video, music and writing. Her work moves through sprawling connections and resonances between linguistics, queer theory, pseudoscience, somatics, community work, internet philosophy and pop culture. She is drawn to phenomena and experiences she finds hard to grasp or articulate. She makes her work in oscillation between playful solo-study, and taking the research questions live with others to test out. Turning them cellular, relational, stranger. Co-producing material that’s then further expanded, chopped, layered and collaged – coagulating something other from it again. Turning a drawing, into a performance score, into a video, into an installation and back again. She is obsessed with what happens when bodies gather – watching, performing, participating; and the messy knowledge that emerges trying to communicate together. She enjoys processes that transform things, as they make her feel like it’s possible for things to change. Right now, Sophie is making drawings, props and prompts for movement, and writing poems about dissociation; vibrating and getting lost between the hyper-demand to stay present, and the deep pull to float away. She set up MINCE, a queer WIP night, to create sweaty, imperfect, collective space for testing live ideas. She is also Managing Director of the queer liberation ensemble F*Choir, and works as an access support worker – building politicised structures for collaboration and experimentation.

instagram.com/sophie_chapman/