March/April 2007
Artscope: New England’s Culture Magazine.

Detritus is a word of consuming fascination to South Africa-born artist Sophia Ainslie; it denotes small particles and materials breaking away from a mass. The state of its ongoing metamorphosis permeates human existence. It’s a central theme she explores in her art while working and teaching in Boston.

Detritus is a prolific process and the principle precept inherent in this sole exhibition. To Ainslie, the progression of one element in transformation into another illustrates a renewal, a recycling process in nature thus in life itself. It is a continuum that also leaves imprints of history and time.

For the last six years, this academic notion planted a fertile seed yielding site-specific installations that grew into provocative, multi-layered mural-size works including her earthworm series titled “Crawlers 4” and “Crawlers 6.”

Ainslie thinks of the underground burrows in the land as a compost site of memory and time. The chaos and change that germinate from moments of dynamic uncertainty fascinate her.

Although the forms in her drawing are predominantly tubular, they reach beyond the simple shape of earthworms; all twisting, undulating into an interlocking mass of organic energy; a tangle of life with wormhole-like openings beckoning one to step beyond to ponder the origin of the universe.

There is panoramic depth conveyed by these rolling forms with some appearing like looping mountains depicted in ancient Chinese art.

The process of recycling is itself integral to how Ainslie works. Fragments of large completed charcoal drawings are cut then pinned but never permanently glued together. Seeking impermanence and tension, she juxtaposes the curled edges of these shapes, positioning them to merge and to repel each other.

Ainslie uses recycled images of mechanically produced billboard posters and enlarged digital prints of her own drawings. Some of her originals are partially erased, drawn over then again erased purposefully capturing scuffed marks of elapsed time as she composes and decomposes to repeatedly express that precarious beauty arising oddly from transition and void.

Her works are large. The size of the collage is twice her standing height and stretches along an entire gallery wall. One has to step back to take in the entire composition. There is a delightful change of scale when one stands closer to the surface of her work; forms and shapes emerge as if when staring skyward one sees faces, figures and animals hidden in the billowing cloud, then one is abruptly pulled back to the ground as one’s eyes catch remnant pieces of Astroturf affixed within the collage.

Visual dissonance and reversals interest Ainslie as much as linear harmony. Much of the joy of her work lies in the process wrestling with it alone in her art studio; it is an intense pedagogic conversation requiring introspect, reflection and agony resisting the trap of complacency accepting of society’s waste and excessive consumerism.

Her work has been in solo exhibitions in London and Johannesburg, along with group shows in France, Norway and Cape Town and Pretoria in South Africa; in America, her work has been exhibited at galleries in California and New York. Ainslie earned her B.F.A. from University of South Africa and her M.F.A. from the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. She currently teaches at the Department of Visual Arts at Northeastern University.

Ainslie’s art exhilarates with inspired immediacy; her process is energetic, and provocatively engaging to one’s intellectual curiosity. This solo show at the Kingston Gallery will be a site-specific installation where she will continue to use the language of drawing to further explore the impetus of recycling as constructed and deconstructed memory of human detritus.

Franklin W. Liu