Sophie Vanhomwegen

Sophie Vanhomwegen, born in Brussels in 1988, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice revolves around digital image, video, sound, collage, painting, and animation. Fascinated since childhood by popular media, including cinema, photography, and advertising, she began questioning early on the power these representations hold over our collective perception.

Through experimentation, visual accidents, and an intuitive exploration of material, she seeks to understand the mechanisms that make certain images so captivating. She quickly grasped the ambivalent nature of these visuals: seductive yet often manipulative. This awareness fuelled a stance that is both critical and creative, leading her to develop her own visual language to reclaim these codes and interrogate their influence on our relationship with reality. Her productions intentionally blur the lines between representation and illusion. By playing with ambiguities, trompe-l'œil effects, and disconcerting textures, she poses a recurring question: can we still trust what we see? Each work acts as a fissure in our perception, revealing the invisible workings of the contemporary image.

After obtaining a Master’s degree in Media Arts at the School of Arts in Ghent, she completed a two-year postgraduate program in Transmedia at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. This program focused on hybrid art forms.There, she pursued both practical and theoretical research into how images are constructed through formal principles of composition, pleasing the senses while shaping a specific way of looking. As part of this inquiry, she produced a series of video pieces that both document and drive the work forward.

Figuratively, her work offers a methodical deconstruction of visual stereotypes, particularly those that objectify the female body. Through collage and repurposing, she questions dominant representations and reveals their implications: body-shaming, the standardisation of bodies, and submission to inaccessible norms. In response, she proposes a recomposition of the gaze, rehabilitating a sensuality filtered through her own subjectivity. Surrealist humour and absurd or dissonant associations punctuate this critical approach.

Since 2021, her work has taken a significant formal turn: painting began to layer onto her digital prints, resulting in deliberately ambiguous hybridisations. These works, at the crossroads of the pictorial and the digital, question the classical hierarchy of media. This challenge to conventions finds a spatial extension in her most recent production: her images break free from their original format to occupy space in the form of paper sculptures. These three-dimensional installations embody a gentle revolt against normative frameworks, while continuing a coherent reflection on visual ambiguity and the reconditioning of the gaze.

'My earliest creative impulses centered on the process of cutting out and rearranging audiovisual footage. I experimented with video, using a camcorder to produce what began as small experiments before evolving into a more deliberate artistic engagement with editing. Around the year 2000, the practice of reappropriating footage recorded from television and documentaries on cassettes was becoming more accessible, thanks to emerging digital technologies. I was drawn to how this process allowed me to construct new narratives from existing material. For me, it became a means of understanding how media constructs stories, exerts influence through seduction, and shapes our perception of reality.  Engaging with images in this way functioned as a form of defense: by dismantling and rearranging them, I could, to some extent, control their influence and intuitively decondition my gaze. This early fascination developed into a strong command of editing techniques. Yet for a long time, my practice remained confined to the digital screen.

At a certain point, I felt a need for materiality. I shifted toward a more analog practice, focused on paper collage. My manual compositions are defined by surgical precision and graphic simplicity. They invite a constant visual ambiguity: is this a physical collage or a digital construction? This orchestrated uncertainty creates a perceptual tension, a continuous oscillation between tangible materiality and digital illusion.

This dialogue between the digital and the analog became fundamental to my process. Since 2020, I started painting on my source material before also enlarging those pieces. More recently, I have begun painting directly onto these enlarged collage prints, initiating a constant back-and-forth between the two mediums. This interplay creates a visual illusion and a perturbed gaze, further unsettling the viewer's perception and questioning the very nature of looking.

Today my approach keeps shifting constantly. I may start with painting, then add collage techniques, only to digitise everything and print it out again. The process underlines my transdisciplinary approach and questions the very notion of authenticity in a work of art.' 

Sophie cultivates a visual sensitivity that renders her acutely aware of the power images hold: how they seduce, manipulate, and shape perception. This awareness led her to begin collecting advertising magazines and printed matter, cutting into their seductive surfaces and reassembling fragments into new compositions. From 2012, her practice shifted toward a more analog approach, driven by a need for materiality after years of working exclusively on screen. 

Her early collages are defined by surgical precision and graphic simplicity, qualities that have remained central to her work. The graphic simplicity is a conscious choice, a reaction against the overload of images in popular media. It became her way to strip away the noise, to create space within the visual chaos. The meticulous precision, too, is not arbitrary. It reflects the sickening impact these idealized images have on women : the pressure to conform, to modify or obsessively adjust one's body to meet impossible standards. The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for the interventions women are led to perform on themselves, both physically and psychologically, in a desperate attempt to align with the images they are fed.

These works immediately establish an ambiguity. An analog collage can easily be mistaken for a digital construction, just as a digital construction can easily be mistaken for a real representation. So what are we looking at ? In a way, she reverses the equation, questioning what we accept as real. But the engagement with these materials is never solely technical. The magazines she sources are filled with hyper-idealized female bodies, images that present a specific, objectified vision of women. For Sophie, encountering these unrealistic representations is deeply unsettling, especially the way women, particularly young women, are sexualized and reduced to narrow criteria of value. This felt shocking then, and remains so now. Her work becomes a way of reappropriating these images, of reclaiming them from the machinery that produced them.

ARTWORKS - SELECTED EXHIBITIONS -  COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS