PRESS RELEASE : Myth, Memory, and the Poetics of the Rural Imagination

“Crockett’s avoidance of the contemporary world gives her a powerful advantage - the story she tells is a deeply human one of survival and self-discovery - a brutal, tough and sometimes truly transcendent one.”        New York Times, 2012

Sophie Crockett presents a new body of work that explores the intersection of folk tradition, storytelling, and the natural world through the medium of oil. Her practice draws upon the visual language of self-taught art, while engaging with the sensibilities of magical realism — crafting an imagined world steeped in rural memory and mythic resonance.

Raised in the Suffolk countryside, Crockett’s early life was shaped by rituals of place: harvest festivals, hedgerows and oral histories. These experiences form the emotional and symbolic core of her work. In her own words: “I reach back into a past for symbols to overlay the uncertain futures around me.” Her paintings evoke a lost yet enduring world — intimate, tactile, and richly storied.

A former award-winning author, Crockett brings narrative complexity and lyrical tension to her visual art. Her debut novel, After the Snow, described by the New York Times as “brutal, tough and sometimes truly transcendent,” shares the same emotional territory as her paintings: an investigation into survival, transformation, and the human condition. “This is my world, a world of story, of human myth, graspable forms, colour and nature. I'm not scared of looking for beauty - I'm trying to understand it all, the beauty and the conflicts. - a visual metaphor, part loss, part dream where I reach back into a past for symbols to overlay the uncertain futures around me.  My work is an imagined world and tempered by my own leanings, but it's also imagery that’s built from my own experiences and fascinations.  I have a thousand stories to tell, they are the fountain of my work.  And I am steeped in rural ways.  I had a 1970’s childhood in Suffolk that seems a million miles away from the countryside of now: Stealing conkers from the churchyard. The first kitten from the farm cat’s nest, oak tree kingdoms climbed from verges covered in cowslips, the watering ponds for just disappeared carthorses, harvest festivals; blacksmiths with forges; maypole dancing, fishing boats on the beaches. Fairy tales read, an obsession with horses, cycling barefoot, paraffin stoves in the bathroom, grabbing at eels in streams, magic and tradition. The blessings of a world before instant entertainment. Legend and storytelling. Horses, horses, horses. All that.”        

Crockett’s unconventional biography informs her artistic practice. Her creative path began in childhood, she then studied theatre before travelling to a newly liberated Germany, becoming the lead singer of a punk band in Nuremberg. She later joined her father sourcing timber in post-Soviet Russia navigating its shifting and often dangerous terrain. These experiences of adaptation and survival continue to inform the emotional tenor of her work. Returning to Suffolk with her first child, Crockett taught herself to paint in oils. A move to rural France, and the birth of a second child, was a time marked by isolation and financial difficulty which led her to write two novels — both of which sold for six-figures to Macmillan.

Technically, Crockett works in oil and charcoal. But the real medium here is story. Every image she creates seems to be whispering an old tale — not the saccharine kind, but the kind with brambles and beasts and real blood beneath the surface. Crockett is drawing from the deep well of folk art, but looking hard at the present, too — especially the parts of it that feel precarious, lost, or worth saving.

She says: “I’m not scared of looking for beauty. I’m trying to understand it. The beauty and the conflicts.” And that’s the magic here. Crockett paints like she’s seen the storm, crawled through it, and come back with a truth in her hands.

Represented by  Milly Green (Art Movement), and Pippa Graber (ArtDog London) her work is already in collections across the UK, Europe, and the States. But what matters most is this: her paintings matter. They mean something. They feel like myth rediscovered.

Go see them. Feel something.