Sonia Boué
Visual Artist
Photo credit Lauren Fleishman for the New York Times, 2021
Artist Statement
Sonia Boué is a multiform visual artist who experiences practice as a position and a location - a state of being where everything is practice. Preoccupations with displacement and identity are significant strands, coalescing in recent works.
Boué combines eclectic research with periods of hyperfocus; her practice spans many forms, including collage and photomontage, writing, advocacy, activism, guest lecturing, project work and mentoring. Intuitive and process-led, Boué’s aesthetics are restrained, yet playful and socially engaged.
A focus on material memory and themes of forced migration and inherited trauma has drawn on Boué's family history of exile, leading to solo work, collaborations and work with Tate Britain (2015), BBC Radio 4 (2018) and the Bodleian Library in Oxford (2018).
Boué's work on neuro-inclusion centres on identity, a writing practice and a series of innovative participatory Arts Council England funded projects. This has culminated in the publication, Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage (2023), and led to consultancy work and mentoring.
Institutional commissions have included photography for MIMA’s Thresholds digital exhibition (2020), a live-stream performance for DASH’s We Are Invisible We Are Visible intervention (2022), and a sculptural installation, Look Well After Yourself at John Hansard Gallery (2024), leading to new work in development titled RIPS (Radically Introverted Practices).
Boué is currently exploring an interest in fluidity and opacity, following a period of stillness.
Biography
Photo credit: José García Lora
Born in 1962, they called Boué 'the earthquake' (la terremoto)
Her first experimental work took place in Mexico. At the age of two, she let go of a beautiful red helium balloon when she was told not to let go. Devastated when it floated away, she recovered by swallowing a burst balloon and two pesos. She also enjoyed talking to dogs.
At seven, Boué took the pegs off a pair of pyjamas, which were drying on her grandmother's balcony in Barcelona, and watched them sail down 5 apartment floors, land on the roof of a passing taxi and disappear into the night. It was cinematic and arguably Boué's creative pinnacle.
Boué is working backwards to unlearn everything that separated her from the girl she once was.
Publicly Funded Projects
2026 Arts Council England funded Research and Development for Individuals for Rip it up and start again
2024 John Hansard Gallery Exhibition Commission funded by Southampton University (Look Well After Yourself)
2023 Arts Council England funded R&D Neurophototherapy 2 project
2021 Arts Council England funded R&D Neurophototherapy project
2020 Arts Council England funded Flow Observatorium Kongress Commission
2020 Covid Commission Disability Arts Online
2020 Thresholds Online Exhibition at MIMA
2020 Arts Council England Covid-19 emergency funding
2020 Arts Council England funded collaboration with Richard Hunt for the Shadowlight Artist’s LUMINOUS project
2018-2019 Arts Council England funded, Neither Use Nor Ornament (NUNO)
2018 AHRC funded Playing A/Part 3 year art film commission
2018 Arts Council England funded collaboration with Richard Hunt for the Shadowlight Artist’s Rising project.
2018 BBC Radio 4 programme The Art of Now: Return to Catalonia, with Overtone Productions
2018 Artist/ mentor, Arts at the Old Fire Station and Crisis Skylight, Our Place Project
2018 Solo exhibition at Arts at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, ¡Buenos Días Dictador!
2017 Arts Council England funded, Museum for Object Research
2017 A-N Professional Development Bursary
2016 Arts Council England funded Through An Artist's Eye project.
2016 Arts Council England funded collaboration with Richard Hunt for the Shadowlight Artist’s Creative Bridges project.
2015 Tate Britain film collaboration about the life of British artist Felicia Browne.