Bio
Sofia Pantsjoha is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and ecology enthusiast recently graduating with a BA in Art & Psychology from Reading School of Art. Their current interests lie in an exploration of the nature-culture dichotomy through their writing and making practices, where they attempt to dissect their environment and navigate it to find alternative modes of being. Pantsjoha gleans sculptural materials from their local environment, which are typically discarded waste or natural materials; aiming in time to leave no trace behind.
Their work draws from Nick Walker’s concept of ‘neuroqueer’, functioning as a noun and as a verb that parallels queer and neurodivergent experiences and ways of being. They embrace their neuroqueer identity and search for further parallels between their lived experience and that of the vegetal world by pursuing multiple non-linear methods and areas of inquiry, disjointed cataloguing, dyspraxic ‘cartography’, and obsessive wordplay. This ‘natural’ way of working contrasts with the harsh edges of human interaction with the vegetal world that is central to their work in the form of discarded pallets and harshly cut tree stumps.
As ‘nature’ should not be separated from the self, their personal ruminations on what it means to be human, ‘neuroqueer’, or plant are central to their work. Writing on pallets in charcoal they transform an object that typically disseminates products into one which disseminates words and moments spent writing. Pallets are a symbol of the escalating extraction of natural resources from across the world. The materials of production and dissemination around us often occlude our awareness of more-than-human life-cycles; sapling, tree, snag, become wood, paper, product. Bringing awareness to the origins of these materials, the artist’s work proposes an alternative way of being that resists linearity and hyper(re)productivity, that they have termed ‘vegetal time-space’. ‘Vegetal time-space’ subverts western attitudes to time (those of control) which are revealed in common western phrases- making, killing, losing, having (time). Instead, looking to trees (which expand with time by growing rings to mark the years) the artist surrenders to a slower, symbiotic way of being that becomes with time rather than possesses it.
Vegetal life has always resisted. Dead tree stumps support insects and fungi as they decay; a refugia in the wasteland of pallets, concrete, and plastic. ‘Futile/fertile’ represents this slow resistance by attempting to bring life back to the heat-treated pallets found along the periphery. Its circular form references deep, queer, and anti-teleological time, and the painstaking layering is reminiscent of the pace of plant movement - desperately trying to ‘hurry up and do nothing’. - Timothy Morton.
‘Stump map - or an experiment in dendrocartography’ highlights the material’s roots and demands attention for the ignored vegetal. The artist spent months mapping, photographing, and ‘being with’ local tree stumps (in Reading and Oxford) to create an interactive digital counter-map. The map functions as a community archive (or even social sculpture) of human/tree relations, open to submissions from the public. It invites us to re-map our attention to the harsh violences of our sick ecosystem, as well as forgotten elements of the vegetal life-cycle; death, decay, and regeneration.
When they are not spending time searching for pallets or discovering stumps, Pantsjoha also writes for an online art magazine where they delve into the colonial roots of the environmental crisis through a cultural/art historical lens, and ponder the role of the artist at a time of ecological crisis.