Sophie Hoyle

Sophie Hoyle's work is primarily concerned with the inner-city environment, and it's effect on those within it. Being based in London, she has particular access to study this dynamic in the sprawl of a capital city, where architecture varies between the overwhelming brutality of modern architecture and the more traditional, but no less powerful designs of many centuries of development, change and turmoil.

Lamina I (2011)

Lamina II (2011)

There is a great deal of density to these images. The photography uses perspective in such a way as to emphasise the grandeur of the buildings, as well as the jarring nature they have on the skyline. They enforce their position as larger beings over all others. The layering of the images over each other gives them the appearance of being ghostly, or transient, as well as creating such a dense composition as to be claustrophobic, particularly in Lamina II where the visible sky is crushed into a small angular form, choked off by the structures.

Biblioteca Nacional I (2011)

Biblioteca Nacional II (2011)

In these pieces, Hoyle has reconstructed buildings, contorting them into brutalistic, almost impossible configurations. In Biblioteca Nacional I she has created a tower, resembling a monument to industrial design, that were it to exist in reality would be so convoluted inside that it would be nightmarish to navigate. Her use of perspective again enforces the sense of the observer being insignificant in comparison to the mass of the structure, it's density becoming suffocating.

In Biblioteca Nacional II, her redesign of the structure is more playful, exaggerating the warped perspective of the source material to create something truly outlandish but fascinating as a space that would be remarkable to explore. These compositions lead the imagination into an exploratory enquiry, and would be fascinating to see recreated in sculpture or in computer aided design software.