SOUTH SHORE LINE
SOUTH SHORE LINE
SOPHIA PIERRE
About THE ARTIST
Sophia Pierre is a writer/director and producer as well as a comics artist. She is originally from Toronto, Canada and has been developing the "Starseed + Her Psychic Warriors" comics series since high school. She received her BFA in film/video and comics from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and has continued to develop the story as a web-series. She completed a prelude short film for the series called "Flight Risk" and has the pilot episode: UTOPIA in post-production. She is accepting inquiries via email for illustration commissions as well as for film production and crew roles.
In her own words: "Central to the narrative structure of my work is emotional topography, as in each issue the main characters take turns having their minds explored by each other— in what they call the “Mindscape.” The Burren region in Ireland is renowned for its slab-stone landscape and flora carried as seeds by the wind from as far as Brazil and transplanted into the cracks between the rocks. In the process of adapting Starseed’s arrival story in the comics for live action --- from the POV of the alien visitor instead of Alice, Wren and Sage’s
---- like these seeds, I see the transience of these characters and of my own artistic practice developing parallel to one another."
Artist Statement (A Nephilim Manifesto)
I would like to preface my proposed order of operations with the fact that I happen to be a uterus-carrier but have never been in the position of a mother and could not pretend to understand what that entails. That being said, it may become apparent in my work that the mere potentiality is an anxious preoccupation of mine. While I put materiality under the microscope I could not, even if I wished to, substitute glamour for substance. I will not submit to the presupposition that the two are antithetical. In a femme’s story she ought to be the hero of her own epic journey. That does not mean it cannot be woven or appliquéd or finished from the comfort of the drawing room. If you let them tell you what your empowerment is supposed to look like, you are still complicit in your own disempowerment. Artists, Writers and filmmakers like Octavia Butler and Anna Biller taught me that they (which is not just men) may not like it or understand it, but God forbid you change your story so that they do.
The Creative Act:
Motherhood for Every-Body
1) My ideas need me: an idea is inseminated by experience in external reality and conceived in the mind (and our platforms for information do not always ask for our consent, *enter the realm of subliminal and more often, supraliminal influence*).
2) I need them: should the idea be well suited to the artist and their practice it will be nurtured and grow. After a lengthy period of incubation it will be manifested back into the external world. Now, outside the protection of the womb—or in the artists’ case: the cranium–the work continues to be nurtured and to grow but is subject to the opinions of others.
3) Eventually others will need them: the artist can try her or his best to protect it, but the fault would be having released it upon the world without incubating it long enough to withstand the scrutiny of the public. It is an artist’s responsibility to generate art that can defend itself against the public eye (this is especially key for satirists and con-artists).
4) They will out-grow me: should it be so fortunate to have successfully vied for the affection of the public, it will eventually leave your watchful eye and live out the rest of its days displayed in a gallery or theatre, tucked away in a collection or on a shelf, on a patron’s wall or circulating the web.
5) Hopefully they will out-live me too: its iterations will be the same “thought-child” re-defining itself in different clothes.
6) I hope never to scrutinize a living being so harshly.
I am only at the beginning of my explorations into the “Manic-Pixie Dream Girl,” the “Cool Girl,” or the “Earth-Angel (Nephilim):” a breed of humanoid reconciling with the Madonna-Whore complex, trying to be everything and nothing—a masochistic, self-mutilating existence. By being inherently complicit in their victimization, they are as much a product of their own making as the Pious and the Dissidents that, through their conflict, breed these ‘culturally degenerate’ titans.