Biography
About the artist
Sonia Ali is a British installation and mixed-media artist working at the intersection of ecology, science and materiality.
Her practice spans installation, sculpture, print, sound and participatory work, and returns persistently to algae — as material, as collaborator, and as a form of non-human intelligence that refuses the categories we build for it. Underneath each piece sits a period of research: in laboratories, in archives, on shorelines, and in conversation with scientists.
Recent bodies of work — including Dissonant scapes and (p)Reserve — think through the Anthropocene as a material condition rather than a headline: borders that drift, taxonomies that fail, and the slow geological time held inside a pigment, a cast block or a length of tape on a floor.
She has collaborated with the Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Edinburgh, exhibited at the Tate Pier Arts Centre, and presented at the AHRC Commons at the University of York. Her physical work is archived in the University of Edinburgh Library Heritage Collections, Coll-1985.
Selected chronology
To be confirmed- 2024Icelandic Skeins — artist book, published via Blurb.
- 2019AHRC Commons presentation, University of York.
- 2017Set of risographs — frames, geometrics, form reductionist.
- 2016Collaboration with the Evolutionary Biology Department, University of Edinburgh.
- 2015Tate Pier Arts Centre.
- 2013Dissonant scapes — Tent Gallery, Edinburgh.
- 2010Blurred Boundaries; Psyche, Shallot-sliced.