We recently connected with Sophie Dupont and have shared our conversation below.

Sophie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My life is my most meaningful project. Questioning what it means to be human today and transform this to my work as an artist. So, my work should be understood as the fruit of many years of work with inner practice; contemplating life in every form, every moment, and every place. Throughout my life, I have sought to assimilate and internalize a way of thinking that engages all levels of being. It is a personal approach, an intimate experience that I share in my work. With my work, I invite the visitor to make an inner journey. A plunge into the secret mysteries of being. For me, it is not a matter of translating a form of the great beyond. Nor is it a matter of simply producing a message or work from dogmatic speech. I rather seek to perceive the music of the world. It is, therefore, from the angle of the intimate confidence and the sharing that my work should be understood. It is due to the simple reason that my work crosses, at different points of reference, ranging from the existential, the temporal, and the geographical.

I am focusing on creating works that directly reflect “human’s basic condition”. I am concerned with breath, rest and sleep as a generator for the work. The life that each of us lives and the imprints we leave in the world interest me.

My work encourages you to consider life in the light of our breath, rest and sleep, for only this awareness – of our body and mind – gives I think real meaning to our existence. The breath that we all share is natural and unconscious and gives us the rhythm to life. Respiration inhabits the human body; it sets it in motion. It is an infinite to- and-from movement. It is also a link between interiority and exteriority. With each inhalation, man absorbs his external environment. With each expiration, man releases his inner environment to the exterior. Outside becomes inside and vice versa. Respiration links man to his environment, but it also links the body to the mind. Body respiration. Psychic breathing. The unity of body and mind becomes, by breathing, a tangible reality. An indivisible whole. A consciousness where everything is present. An act of creation.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I was 14 years old, I got paralyzed. I lived in a zone of danger since my parents got divorced when I was 8, and my stepfather stepped into my life. Both my parents were psychologists, and so was my stepfather. Every night, he would beat my mother, we had to flee the home, and sometimes it was only my mother, who would leave, leaving me behind, not knowing if she ever would return. I lived on a constant scenario between wishing to die and hoping that we would move away from him, but we never did. In the end, my body stopped, and later, my mother was suffering from breast cancer and died when she was only 44 years old. Being paralyzed in the body is a very long result of being paralyzed in the emotions, the mind, in the breathing. Since that time, all my focus has been to return to my life – to get my life back, so to speak, and that’s why I started, and I still do what I do -working around the very core of life.

I started to study dance both as a release of all the stress and tension I had stored inside – it became my catharsis -a way to enter my body again – to breathe. Later, I began to paint in abstract ways my sensations and feelings onto images of people in magazines –a way to release my inner pain. Today, all my work as an artist is about breathing, resting, how to carry one’s own self, how to balance oneself, how to be a human being together in respectful ways with others, and what kind of imprints we leave on each other. I don’t take life for granted, and I constantly place awareness of what makes us alive and what makes us want to live and keep connecting into ourselves and into one another in balanced, respectful and empathic ways.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

To share and connect with other people. When there is a resonance between me and the people attending my work. When my work gives inspiration.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I want to reduce the distance between art and life. I am investigating what is it that makes us alive? The breath is a personal power, political resistance and a spiritual practice. Breath is spirit.

My activist practice is based on respect for all living, a horizontal view of life, an openness into unknown worlds. I want to cultivate non-judgmental behaviour and create care for others and establish new connections. I try to create a space in art for healing and catharsis. My works are about care and address the vital connections between people that are beyond speech – the pure presence of breath, the pause, care, resonance and respect. My artistic work explores an activist breath and I hope this gives other people inspiration to get closer to life. Get rid of the noise so to speak. To realise how much we all are connected and floating in oxygen – how similar we are in our aliveness and the needs we have. I like to regard my work as a practise to be more and more aware of our aliveness and that being alive means to have death and vulnerability as a constant reality – if we truly realise how fragile our life is I do think we would be much more aware of being sensitive and open into our own innerness and in this also other people’s innerness, vulnerability and fragility and creating a world with greater care and love.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sophiedupont.com
• Instagram: sophie__dupont
• Facebook: Sophie Dupont
• Linkedin: Sophie Dupont
• Youtube: Sophie Dupont

Image Credits
Helle Moos, Bar Mayer, Thierry Forien, Jeppe Michael Jensen, Ken Cheong