Phoebe-Agnès Sinclair

I utilize the body as a site and tool for investigating transformation, contradiction, and the numinous. Integrating classical oil painting with research on spiritual ecstasy, embodiment psychology, and alchemy, I work with images that address paradoxes. Alongside painting, photographs are manually manipulated as a way of abstracting the image, disrupting the supposedly fixed surface of a print with my fingers and inviting my body into a mechanically produced image. Water and light both function similarly, acting as both subject and metaphoric process through which the figure transforms, fracturing reality and elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this way, the body becomes both medium and metaphor, a shifting surface where matter and spirit, the seen and unseen, continuously inform one another.
​
The world seems to be bound together by webs of dialecticals that somehow enforce and enhance each other- loss invites preciousness, light requires shadow, and a color’s ideal complement is its opposite on the color wheel. What interests me is not just the separation of the world into dialectical halves, but the moments when those halves collide. I’m drawn to those moments of paradox because of the feeling they evoke in me- a kind of fizzing instability that leaves me both aching and alive.

Shaped by a background in dance and somatic practice, time spent living in a French monastery, and early experiences of death and bodily fragility, Phoebe-Agnes Sinclair investigates the body’s role in mediating between the material and the spiritual. Raised at the intersection of contrasting worlds– an academic from Berkeley, California, and a poet from rural Louisians– Sinclair’s work returns repeatedly to paradox, where seemingly opposing forces are held in productive tension.

Sinclair received an atelier training at Townsend Atelier, the New York Academy of Art, and the Florence Academy of Art before earning degrees in Philosophy and Art from Sewanee: The University of the South. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Georgia, where her interdisciplinary practice combines painting, photography, and installation to investigate perception, transformation, and the porous boundaries between body, image, and spirit.