Alexandra Sophie’s recent practice unfolds through a persistent questioning of reality itself. Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, she constructs environments where the ordinary appears quietly displaced, allowing the familiar to become uncertain. Rather than presenting fantasy as an escape from the real world, her works suggest that the extraordinary may already exist within everyday experience, waiting to be noticed. 

This ambiguity has long been present in her photographic work, where bodies often merge with flowers, landscapes, and light, dissolving clear distinctions between the human and the natural. In her recent sculptural installations, this concern expands beyond the image and into physical space, inviting the viewer to inhabit these uncertain conditions directly. 

Thresholds and Parallel Worlds

In Through the Looking Glass, Sophie imagines the mirror not simply as an object of reflection, but as a threshold. Constructed from steel, branches, glass, and ceramic elements, the work proposes the possibility of another landscape existing just beyond ordinary perception. Rather than functioning as a symbolic device, the mirror becomes a physical invitation to imagine alternative realities embedded within the spaces we already occupy. 

The work avoids the dramatic language often associated with portals or fantasy. Instead, its power lies in subtle displacement. A museum, a street, or a living room might suddenly become the entrance to somewhere else. The boundary between reality and imagination is not broken, but softened.

The Body Returning to Nature

This concern with transition continues in Grounding. At first encounter, the work appears almost comforting: an antique bed frame covered with living moss, inviting closeness through its softness and familiarity. Yet as the viewer approaches, another possibility emerges. The outline of a body seems to have been absorbed into the landscape itself. Has someone simply lain down, or has nature quietly reclaimed them? 

The work speaks to contemporary conditions of withdrawal and exhaustion, but it resists becoming a direct social commentary. Instead, it imagines rest as a more radical form of transformation. The bed no longer separates the body from the world but becomes part of a wider ecosystem, where distinctions between shelter, landscape, and self begin to dissolve.

At the centre of Grounding is a question of bodily limit: where does the human form end, and where does the surrounding world begin? Sophie’s interest in the porous relationship between body and nature takes on a sculptural form here. The work no longer represents the body from a distance, but allows it to appear as a trace, an absence, or a pressure within the material world.

When Objects Refuse Their Identity

A similar instability appears in Is it cake?. Throughout Sophie’s work, objects rarely remain fixed within a single category. They occupy an uncertain territory between the organic and the artificial, the domestic and the ritualistic, resisting the immediate certainty that naming usually provides.

Rather than questioning the authenticity of the object itself, the work quietly interrogates the relationship between the thing and the symbolic systems through which it is recognised. The title, borrowed from a familiar cultural reference, immediately activates a network of expectations. A cake is never simply an arrangement of materials. It carries associations of celebration, intimacy, offering, memory, and consumption. The object exists not only through its physical substance, but through the meanings that language and culture have accumulated around it.

Sophie gently unsettles this correspondence. Faced with the work, the viewer recognises the form before understanding its material reality. Perception arrives before knowledge, and naming becomes uncertain. What appears to be a cake gradually reveals itself as something else, exposing the fragile agreement that normally binds an object to its identity.

In this sense, Is it cake? is less concerned with illusion than with the instability of the sign itself. The work suggests that objects never possess fixed meanings, but are continuously produced through acts of recognition, memory, and cultural projection. The distance between what a thing is and what it signifies is not a gap to be resolved, but a space in which meaning remains in constant negotiation.

This concern resonates throughout Sophie’s wider practice. Mirrors become thresholds, beds become landscapes, and ordinary materials acquire unfamiliar presences. Rather than transforming one object into another, her work reveals that the world we inhabit is already constructed through symbols, where reality itself depends upon the names and narratives we collectively agree to believe.

A Poetics of Uncertainty

What connects these works is not narrative, but a disturbance in the conditions of recognition. Mirrors, beds, and cakes cease to function as stable objects; they become thresholds where name, use, and appearance begin to separate. In this quiet estrangement, Sophie’s practice becomes thought-provoking through the grotesque, allowing the familiar to turn uncertain without losing its tenderness.