About

Sophia Childs graduated with First Class Honours from the School of Art & Design, ANU in 2023. She also holds a Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship and a Master of Museum and Heritage Studies. Childs is interested in the language of expanded painting for its potential to unpack constructed meanings, imagination, processes, ambiguity, diverse experiences, and ontological doubt, among other things. Childs is a process-based artist who combines textiles, sculpture, and installation with her own curatorial practice to investigate the question of ‘what is painting?’. For Childs, this question is inextricably tied to the question of ‘what is living?’. Childs self-describes as an autistic absurdist; she is interested in the human desire for shared meaning and the tensions, curiosities, and confusion that come with this desire.

Currently, her practice centres on stockpiling found textiles, which are then cannibalised to form grounds/surfaces for her non-representational paintings. DIY aesthetics, collage, montage and abstraction inform the forms she creates through this methodology. She is interested in how this process allows for a back-and-forth between the materials and maker - often finding surprising combinations through using fabrics of differing colours, textures, thicknesses and various methods of painting with acrylics. Printing, pressing, spilling, staining, and brushing are all descriptions of actions embedded into her painting practice. A practice in which she aims to decentre herself to listen to the material agency of what she is working with.

Her honours body of work, ‘Painting is Undead: Non-Representational Painting on Sutured Surfaces’ was made in response to the informational overload of the post-digital age, histories of abstraction and expanded painting and the themes of knowledge, responsibility and alienation explored in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She continued to combine questions of the conventions of painting with metaphors of zombies/mutants and the abject body in her body of work developed for Canberra Contemporary’s BLAZE 2025.

Current work is exploring moulds of her body in relation to machine-stitched paintings and found objects. She continues to be inspired by creatives across all fields of existence.

Her work resides in private collections of individuals and businesses within Australia.

Sophia Childs also works in education at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia.