Sonja Witts is an artist using the mediums of printmaking and drawing, with her early career including ceramics and sculpture. Her art practice has always had a connection with the sea, revealed through concerns with island culture, migration and vessels as means of travel and transportation.
In 2020 in a gap between lockdowns, Sonja moved from Edinburgh to the Isle of Lewis. Exploring her new home, as individual and through the lens of motherhood, has been the platform for her recent body of work - a personal perspective of the figure within the landscape - the effect of this ancient land on the child; creating work that celebrates the joy, the wildness and exhilaration felt at being in the natural world - but also betrays senses of danger, a maternal anxiety, fears for the fragility of the human body and the peril of our ecological environment. Her subjects are domestic and elemental.
Sonja has a visceral and intuitive approach to image making - a drawing may begin with a portrait or from observing nature, but she revels in the mutability of imagery, will bring in ideas from memory or folklore; the work will materialise from acts of chance, yielding and experimentation and her innovative processes naturally produce work in multiples or as a series that reveals it's evolution.