About
Sonya is a Singapore-based artist exploring repetition as a tool for emotional grounding. Through impasto and layered mark-making, her 'emotional landscapes' translate internal states into tactile forms, using rhythm and gesture as a non-verbal language shaped by her lived experiences.
Sonya's practice centres on painting as both process and inquiry, where the act of making becomes a meditative means of navigating emotion. Working through cycles of repetition, she builds dense, textured surfaces that register subtle shifts in feeling over time. These accumulative gestures form visual fields that are at once structured and intuitive, reflecting a balance between control and release.
Within Sonya's 'emotional landscapes', abstraction functions as a space of containment and expression. Rather than depicting specific narratives, her work evokes psychological terrains and states that are felt rather than seen. The physicality of paint, applied through thick impasto and rhythmic layering, emphasises the body’s presence in the act of making, grounding emotion within material form.
Repetition in Sonya's practice operates as both a formal strategy and conceptual framework, mirroring cycles of persistence, return and emotional processing. Through sustained engagement, her paintings become records of duration, holding traces of time and embodied experience.
Sonya is graduating from the BA (Hons) Fine Arts programme at LASALLE College of the Arts and will soon begin a master's degree in art therapy, extending her interest in the relationship between art-making and emotional experience into a therapeutic context.
Ever-Fluctuating
Ever-Fluctuating explores the shifting nature of emotional states through layered, repetitive mark-making. Built using impasto oil paint, the surface is composed of petal-like strokes applied slowly and repeatedly.
Each gesture acts as a grounding process, allowing emotion to be stabilised through rhythm and movement. As layers build, earlier marks remain visible beneath the surface, suggesting that emotions do not disappear but continue to exist over time. Colours flow, overlap and interrupt one another, reflecting emotional complexity.
The work transforms internal experience into a tactile landscape, where repetition becomes a way of holding, processing and understanding emotions.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
This body of work emerged from Sonya's research into repetition as a method for emotional grounding within contemporary painting.
Rooted in process-based abstraction, her practice investigates how internal states can be translated into material form through gesture, rhythm and duration. Through iterative mark making and layered impasto, each painting becomes a record of shifting emotional conditions over time.
Informed by ideas of affect, embodiment and non-verbal expression, her research positions painting as both a reflective and therapeutic space. Meaning is not fixed, but gradually unfolds through sustained engagement with process, material and the accumulation of marks.
Qalisha Muhammad Fariq
Ow Yeong Li Wen
Nehal Agarwal
Serene Lee
John Leong
Yuni Sara Binte Hussaini
