She was born in Clichy la Garenne
but did not stay long since, at the age of eighteen months, she moved with her family to
Casablanca in Marocco. The landscapes and coastline of this wonderful country have left their
mark since the influence of its magnificent light and brilliant, shimmering colours can be
found in her work today. Each summer, the family would return to the south of France, crossing
Spain by car but always taking a different route.
Her parents decided to come back to France when Sophie was nine and the move proved to be
something of an upheaval. She sought solace by writing texts, poems and invented imaginary
characters which she recounted to her sister. Despite the family's frequent moves, Sophie was
a hard-working pupil, quiet and rather shy. At home she was more mischievous and spent most of
her time making decorations in the form of mandalas.
She was fascinated by studies of the human body and began to focus on biology and natural sciences.
She obtained a science-based baccalaureate in Limoges and started university in the family's
then home-town of Toulouse where she signed up to study medicine. However, she soon realised
that the classification and description of bones was not her way of enhancing knowledge and
that she really wanted to express her own personal visions. The painter and teacher Claude
Jeanmart, encouraged her to go to Paris where she enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at
the University of Paris 1 where she obtained her master's degree in 1980.
The previous year she made a journey of several months in Africa and visited Niger, Mali, Benin,
Togo and Ghana. She returned from this land of violent contrasts, where the sublime sits
alongside the sordid with a collection of sketches, memories and scents.
She looks back on her years of study with great fondness and appreciates the stimulation and new
ideas they brought her.
Then, at a time when she had hardly ever been sailing in her life, she seized the opportunity to
join a crew en route for the West Indies, passing by the Spanish coast and the Canaries. It was
a trip which brought back the happiness and freedom of her youth. An existence in harmony with
nature, flux transparency, light, sun and water. The endless repetition of the cosmic cycles
proved a great calming influence. The return voyage took her to the Azores and once back in
France she settled in Toulouse and decided to concentrate seriously on painting since the
sailing expedition released a desire to share her experiences. At this time she worked with
Claude Jeanmart and the choreographer Jean-Marc Matos to research the body and movement.
To pay the rent on her studio, she decided in 1985 to set up a workshop where she gave classes
based on training visual perception to memorise forms in movement. This was translated into
drawing in a musical context.
In her quest for meaning and because of a deep-felt need for spirituality she took up different
forms of meditation, prayer, followed lessons in body movement based on martial arts such as
Taichindo and took a great interest in Tibetan and Buddhist culture.
During this period her work was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Toulouse (Réfectoire
des Jacobins), Germany, Nice and Barcelona.
Her encounter with new and different tools including a graphical palette, 2D and 3D image
software and animation took place towards 1986 and this helped to develop her technique
towards the notion of installation. In 1993 she made a two-month trip to the United States and
crossed the country from Florida to California. Upon her return, her vision of things had
completely changed and she became convinced that the leap towards a use of new tools was the
only way to give full expression to her thoughts about flux, transformations and changes in
mental and physical postures. The book of Yi-King became her personal Bible.
She furthered her work with the Art 3000 studio and in 1994 one of her works entitled
"Hexagramme" was featured in the inaugural exhibition of this workshop in Paris.
In 1995, with the first version of a virtual reality installation "CENTRE-LUMIERE-BLEU" which
was exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre, at the first Biennial in Metz and at the Futuroscope
in Poitiers, she made the definitive step towards using complex technologies in her work in
preference to traditional techniques.
At the same time, as though to prove that there are no coincidences in life, she met Fred Forest
who, in January 1996, invited her to take part in his seminar at the Musée d'Art Moderne in
Nice.
The second version of 'CENTRE-LUMIERE-BLEU' was presented at F.A.U.S.T (Forum des Arts de
l'Univers Scientifique et Technologique) in Toulouse in October 1996, at the Cité des Sciences
et de l'Industrie in Paris in January 1997, at the first Art and Technology Festival in
Compiègne in March 98 and at the Espace Landowski in Boulogne-Billancourt for the "Arts
virtuels, créations interactives et multisensorielles" (Virtual arts, interactive and
multisensorial designs) exhibition which was organised by Frank Popper and also featured work
by Fred Forest.
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