ARTIST
About
My work grows from a fascination with the silent stories held by forgotten places. As a diver and artist, I explore abandoned buildings, submerged wrecks, and marine environments where time transforms matter. Through painting and sculpture, I draw connections between these worlds: crumbling walls echo eroded shipwrecks, faded surfaces recall bleached coral, and objects become traces of what once existed. Between memory and metamorphosis, my work reflects on fragility, disappearance, and our relationship with a changing environment.
Biography
Sonya Kertész is a multidisciplinary artist working in oil and acrylic painting and ceramic sculpture. She graduated with honours in Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) from Concordia University in Montreal.
Her practice is deeply influenced by travel and more than thirty years of scuba diving and underwater photography. Through abandoned places, shipwrecks, marine environments, and organic forms, she explores memory, transformation, and the traces left by time and human presence.
Her work also reflects a growing concern for the fragility of marine ecosystems, bringing together personal observation, environmental awareness, and a fascination with places and forms undergoing transformation.
Approach
My practice explores the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, the tangible and the ephemeral. Working across oil painting, acrylic, and ceramics, I am drawn to places and forms marked by time, transformation, and disappearance. In my figurative paintings, abandoned interiors and submerged wrecks become spaces of memory. Crumbling walls, faded frescoes, corroded structures, and marine growth reveal the slow transformation of matter. My experience as a diver and underwater photographer has shaped the way I observe these environments, where the familiar can become strange and the real can verge on abstraction. My abstract paintings offer a more instinctive and physical approach. Through layering, wiping, dripping, and unconventional tools, I work between spontaneity and construction, allowing forms and imagined territories to emerge through color, rhythm, and gesture. Ceramics extends this exploration into three dimensions. Clay, shaped by hand and transformed by fire, allows me to evoke erosion, coral growth, fossilized forms, and objects altered by time. Across these different practices, I return to the same questions: what remains, what disappears, and how matter carries memory. Between land and sea, control and chance, presence and absence, I seek to capture the poetry of transformation.