ART SINGAPORE 2025: Sophie Birch and Melinda Braathen

Both female abstract oil painters, their imagery is that of the natural world. While Birch’s luminous paintings layered and etched away reveal a weathered obscurity, Braathen’s paintings exude a frenetic energy of having just been brought to life. To compare Birch’s work to the ecological forces that make up layers of sedimentary rocks, inversely, Braathen’s work is that of a storm or landslide that arrives and dissipates abruptly. 

Birch’s paintings take on an animistic quality, an erosion that can be likened to ground dust, worn velvet, or faded denim jeans. The natural systems in her paintings appear as an uncovering, emerging deep from within themselves through an intimate tactility that is often achieved through manipulation of the fingers, “like make-up, scrubbed in, bathed, and wiped away”. There is a magnetism when faced with Birch’s paintings as one is slowly pulled into their web, the psychological layers of dreaming, the subconscious— thresholds of transformation and recognition. 

Braathen’s work is more immediate— small, quick paint strokes are layered over each other to emulate a vibrational hum. One’s first reaction produces an almost visceral emotional response which resonates with an external source. Specifically due to her use of color and movement, the way that paint builds on Braathen’s canvases can be likened to the accumulation of energy— there is a beauty and chaos seeming on a precipice of an unknown sensation. Her depictions of landscapes exude an othering; visually dream-like there is something beyond the surface that speaks to an inevitable force that nature produces, something that can never be rounded off or fully understood. 

If Braathen’s work speaks to an exteriority, Birch’s work is the interior. Birch’s paintings depict natural innards; bodily cross-sections, the inside of a raindrop, a cocoon. The elemental scenes by Braathen speak to the breadth of emotional volatility that can be mirrored through enigmatic environments found externally. While one painter draws you in, the other one knocks you back, creating a dialogue between our interior and exterior thought processes. 

There are similarities present in both artists’ depictions of figuration, the body is never fully complete or present. It is more rather the absence of the body, the ghost or imprint of someone in flux. These loosely rendered figures are often taken from life, close friends of the artists become melded into these works alluding to an intimacy demonstrating the indecipherability between each artist’s most personal lives and the work they create.