ARTIST STATEMENT AND BIO

ARTIST BIO

Soraia Andersen is a mixed-race artist and Third Culture Kid, born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1983 to a mother of Norwegian and Angolan heritage and a Portuguese father. She moved to London at fifteen, where she continues to live and work.

An award-winning fine artist, Andersen has exhibited in the UK, USA and Canada, and her work is held in numerous private collections. Working through a multi-disciplinary practice including print, painting, drawing and collage, her autobiographical practice explores transformation, power and powerlessness, perception, labels and belonging. Each series investigates a different facet of her own fragmented identity.

Through Farbe London, she extends her artistic practice into everyday life, bringing colour and form into objects that can be held, used and lived alongside.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice begins with colour and form, and with questions about what it means to exist. Through a multi-disciplinary practice I investigate my own fragmented identity, exploring transformation, power and powerlessness, perception, labels and belonging. Each new series becomes a way of examining another facet of myself.

I remember becoming acutely conscious of my own existence at the age of four. That early awareness, and the difficulty of making sense of being alive, continue to shape both my work and my search for self-actualisation.

Within my compositions, relationships between shapes, colours and layers hold tension and playfulness, stillness and movement. These relationships allow me to explore complexity without having to resolve it into a single, fixed meaning.

Making offers me a state of flow, a space in which I can encounter and transform painful experience. Through this process, I continuously transmute my pain into colour.

Influenced by Matisse’s cut-outs, I cut, paint and layer mixed media. Each work develops through an intensive process lasting three to six months, accumulating layers, fragments and meaning.

Mirrored paper brings the viewer into this process. Catching glimpses of themselves within the surface, they become part of the work. My hope is that this encounter offers them space to recognise, reflect upon or let go of something of their own.

My practice truly directs my self-actualisation. As a human being walking a finite path towards my very own extinction, above all, I seek to think deeply about things and make things, whilst thinking deeply.