Sophia Wright Emigh
Sophia Wright Emigh
Sophia Wright Emigh (she/they) is an interdisciplinary, queer mother artist and movement filmmaker working in the emerging field of somatic ecology via performance, installation, film, photography, mark-making, social practice, writing, and action. Through camera, body, sound, and embodied ritual, she traverses and transmits the dance of life around the ineffable.
Sophia plays in the realms of belonging, mycelial networks, ancestral transmutation, wicked/mystic lineage tracing, quantum witnessing, partnership with the sublime/profane, unconditional/deconditioned earth body co-regulation, and the common space between whirling dervishes, hurricanes, and black holes. Her durational, intermedia-documented somatic practices engender deep listening within the stillness-movement continuum to cultivate absorption into currents unseen.
Woven since birth into the function of artmaking, dancemaking, and songmaking as essential to the sustenance of movements and communities, Sophia trained formally in dance and directing alongside her life study of fissure-planting and liberation-dowsing. She holds a BA in Performance Studies from Yale University and is currently an MFA student with Transart Institute For Creative Research. Her work and performance have been screened and presented internationally, in museums, galleries, festivals, and streets.
Sophia now lives and enacts daily practice on the unceded Ndakinna land of the Western Abenaki, in lifelong apprenticeship to decolonization, abolitionism, somatic remediation, and re-imagined futures. She belongs to red cedar, lavender, dandelion, ghost pipe, mugwort, wild rose, and barn owl, and feels her roots in the Askaskwiwajoak mountains, the moss, and the north branch of the Winóskizibó river.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
My practice of finding internal origin through somatic ecology calls upon slow time, whole time, geologic time. I sense, seed, and water practical daily somatic rituals (inclusive of movement, sounding, and nervous system regulation), simultaneously and atemporally documenting the experiential insights and in-sensations through mark-making (notes, sketches, earth pigmentation), film as witness, audio recordings of songs and environmental sounds, and other forms of translation from my body. Committed to rhythmic, sedimentary, imaginal, adaptive presence, I visit the seeds I plant and witness what emerges in their transforming landscape.
I channel emergent patterns to organize my findings into create queer, feral, immersive settings and containers for the cultivation of rest, listening, and intuitive connection, where dissolution and deeper meaning may reveal themselves. These spaces invite unknowing, crack-sensing, grace, fugitivity, the subtle edge of the sublime, and space for the wild world (our imprinting caregiver) to intervene in the juggernaut of our human psyches.
My practice and resulting visual and aural traces regulate my own system (as queer, disabled, m/other and future soil) in relation to the earth body, and aim to invite attunement and transmutational processes in those who experience, witness, or participate in my work.