Sophie has always had an innate sense of creativity.

Sophie Ryan is an emerging artist from Bathurst, New South Wales, now based in Canberra. Growing up surrounded by wide, open landscapes sparked her love for colour, texture and movement — things that continue to shape her work today. For Sophie, painting is a way of capturing the feeling of a place rather than just how it looks — a mix of memory, emotion, and intuition.

She moved to Canberra in 2018 to study at the ANU School of Art and Design, graduating in 2022. Her practice focuses mostly on painting, using gestural brushstrokes, bold colour, and layered texture to explore connection to place and the energy of the landscape.

Sophie’s recent work dives into ideas of gesture, embodiment and memory — often blurring the lines between painting and drawing — as she finds new ways to express what landscapes feel like, not just what they are.