ABOUT
I create because it is the best I can do to show up in the world as authentically human. In a moment defined by accelerating collapse and relentless extraction, our relationship to the world is increasingly mediated by loss. The familiar is in evolution—species, communications, cultures, seasons, histories, borderlines, land... Hope then too becomes adaptive, mutable, playful in its shifting across the fertile edge of change and encounter. Looking directly at this unraveling means interpenetrating personal and planetary worlds. Holding hope begins with a deep understanding of our relational interdependence: as stewards of a nuanced, contextualized ecocommunity. This understanding emerges through intimate encounters with what lives at the center of our beings. I am called to engage with my unique positionality through tangible, multimedia expressions of collective hope for a gentle decline towards communal autonomy and ecological care. I have found hope in care as a practice of sustained attention and response—an ongoing and meandering conversation with the vast and unbearably beautiful world I inhabit and change.
I situate the self, and by extension the human, within a paradoxical space—at once powerful and powerless. Through image-making, writing, and multisensory installation, I trace the contours of awe in my natural home, where the land is both a mirror and a window to ongoing ecological change. In asking, What can I do? I am met with a single and demanding call. A call to care.
Born in 2004, Sophie Rubin is a practicing artist who studies under the departments of philosophy, visual arts, and the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They conduct ongoing research on ecological care, cultural worldbuilding processes, and the ethical structures of agrarian communities.