Sovay Berriman’s practice spans sculpture, drawing, film, broadcasting, research and social, collaborative learning situations. Her work reviews and questions systems and structures of power, challenging us to claim agency and responsibility for the roles we play in the ecosystems we occupy. Her work is also rooted in her lived experience of otherness – with poverty, precarity, neurodivergence, trauma and minority culture influencing the work she makes. Sovay aims to bring people and ideas together to foster responses of sensitive imagination and empowerment, in response to the mess, tensions and challenges of many of our lives.

Recent projects and commissions include: Catching Copper, National Trust: East Pool Mine, Cornwall (2025); MESKLA at Kresen Kernow, Cornwall’s Archive Centre (2025); Hospital Rooms commission for Cove Ward, Longreach House, Cornwall Hospitals Trust (2024); Clore Visual Art Fellow, ReWilding Arts Leadership, secondment with National Theatre Scotland (2023-24); Gwyrdh Glas - Liwyow a Gernow, part of MESKLA commissioned for Flamm Cornwall with Art Night (2023).

Copper Drawing I (2025) considers the shifting and layering markers of self and relationships with land, culture and ancestry. Made with watercolour and gouache on paper, the marks are feeling their way around an imagined lump of copper - echoing the repetitive making process of Wrapping Copper.

“I envisage the object in the drawing coming into being. Copper, a mineral pulled from deep within the land, cast into many possible forms. I turn the object around in my mind to see it from different perspectives and draw it in these mutable states” - Sovay Berriman

Maylya (Making in The Dry) (2025) is a photograph from the making of the film Maylya. The film Maylya (Mye-lee-a, vb. to bind, envelop, wrap) is a performance to camera where the artist heaves, pulls and draws a sculpture into being, binding together a collection of materials to create one mass, where the tension between elements is visible, as they work together to hold their form.

“As I wrap, I meet the same points again and again but each time the surface changes and time passes. Through this action I think about how understanding and perspective shifts and evolves with changing context.” - Sovay Berriman

This work explores themes of ancestry, labour and land – the responsibility that we have to each, and the connectedness of all things.

• Copper Drawing I, watercolour and gouache drawing on paper, 40 x 40cm, 2024 – £420
• Flamm x AH Print: Maylya (Making in The Dry), 29.7 x 42 cm, 2025 (limited edition of 25) – £75 (unframed)