Sofie Grevelius

Sofie references architecture, signs and road markings in her work. She explains where she gets her inspiration from below.

Sofie Grevelius creates a world of signs, symbols and objects that appear familiar but are not quite what they seem. She finds her inspiration in the many shapes, forms and colours that animate and demarcate our built environment, from road markings and signage to physical fixtures such as railings and doors. By a process of subtle modification, she turns these everyday reference points into something altogether more elusive and perplexing. Her colourful prints and three-dimensional objects remind us of everyday urban experience, but also hint at the complex inter-relationship between autonomy, dependency and control. 

Sophie Grevelius Rca
Sofie Grevelius, Show RCA, 2012

Grevelius did her BA at Central St Martins and graduated with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2012. She lives between London and Kungshamn in Sweden.


Interview with Sofie Grevelius

Tell us about the relationship your work has to the made/designed environment?

I began making sculpture using found materials so my attention to the made and designed environment started as a hunt for materials, always keeping an eye out for things that I could re-appropriate.

Nowadays I am interested in imitating or mimicking everyday shapes and objects in an attempt to highlight them, and by doing so perhaps also understand their effect on us. 

Recently I’ve become concerned with trust, especially in relation to power, and I want to investigate what effects our surroundings have upon us - what does it mean to lean or rely on something? How can a yellow box create structure?

What does a plastic bag have in common with a scaffold? Maurice Blanchot describes the everyday as something we never see for a first time but always see again. I would like my work to have a similar quality.

Sophie Grevelius

Sofie Grevelius, Road works (yellow), 2012

Your work appears to be quite formal. This gives it a familiar quality, yet it seems to confound expectations as to whether it is painting or sculpture, 2d or 3d. 

The seemingly formal qualities of the work come through a constant striving for simplicity. The more you pare things down or simplify an expression, the more complicated and open to interpretation it becomes. That is a paradox I really enjoy working with - a complicated simplicity.

I want the work to carry a certain open-endedness or ambiguity because that brings opportunities and possibilities, and it is more true to life. The more ways to experience a piece of work, the better. In that way it has less to do with authorship and more to do with democracy.

I find there is no difference between 2d and 3d. To my mind, a drawing and a sculpture are of equal value, and they need each other to create an interesting dynamic. To create an interesting space you need a range of materials and dimensions.


Contributed by Ruth Wilbur

Ruth is Projects and Outreach Coordinator at Axisweb.

Ruth Wilbur's staff profile on Axisweb


Sofie was selected for MAstars from MA Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art by Shama Khanna - axisweb.org/mastars/sofie-grevelius


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