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Sophie Vallance Cantor creates dreamlike scenes featuring tigers, neon figures and hazy atmospheres drawing on her lived experiences and neurodivergent perspective.
Sophie Cantor is a British artist, who creates portals into fantasy realms, worlds without rules, and liminal spaces where imagination is in control and everyday boundaries dissolve. Drawing on her lived experience as a female artist with insights from her autistic identity, Cantor sees her practice as an antidote to daily life — a place where cats transform into tigers and complex relationships can be explored through the safe distance of fantasy.
Much like Alice escaping through the rabbit hole to Wonderland, Cantor’s works are self-professed “antidotes” shaped in part by her experience of autism. Her works break the boundaries of real life and fantasy; her self-portraits grow horns, and neon-lit figures smoke burning cigarettes in the dark.
Cantor's dreamlike narratives are mirrored in her saturated colour palettes. While they may break from realistic depictions, their joy and vibrancy develop her already joyful narratives. Cantor’s work is also highly influenced by the visual language of late 20th-century American cinema, leading to motifs such as neon signage, cocktails, and cigarette smoke featuring in these imaginary worlds. Through this collaboration between imagination, escape, and cultural symbolism, Cantor’s paintings capture a nostalgic yet surreal atmosphere. For Cantor, the act of painting is a deeply essential journey through which she explores identity and seeks meaning in unanswerable questions of existence.
A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts in 2015, Cantor held her first solo exhibition in 2020. Her work has since been featured at the London Art Fair (2024) and Art Rotterdam (2025), and she has been recognised as both a Hopper Prize and Ingram Collection finalist.
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