Sophie Coe is an emerging artist living and working in lutruwita/Tasmania. She completed her Honours in Fine Art at the University of Tasmania in 2025, earning First Class Honours, where she developed an autoethnographic approach to contemporary painting. Her Honours project, Best in Show, uses horses as proxies for women shaped by beauty standards, exploring how the commodification of the female body functions as a system of social control. Through this research, Sophie has established an ongoing inquiry into the tension between surface aesthetics and the internal pressures that influence women’s lives, grounding her practice in feminist analysis and reflective studio work.

Sophie held her first solo exhibition at Good Grief Studios in 2025. She has participated in several group exhibitions, including three at the student-run Sunroom Gallery, where she also served as co-chair of the Sunroom Gallery Society. In this role, she curated and participated in Fringe Void, a student exhibition presented as part of Dark Fringe. These projects strengthened her dedication to creating artist-led spaces and exploring collaborative and self-directed ways of presenting work.

Sophie was a finalist for the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2023 and 2024. She earned the Rotary Emerging Artist Prize and the Bett Gallery Award for her Honours work. These recognitions support the direction of her current practice, which explores how beauty functions as a subtle form of control that influences behaviour, attention, and self-esteem. Through detailed oil painting, Sophie employs traditional modes of representation to expose how prettiness disciplines and distracts under the guise of choice. Her work creates a space to question who benefits from aesthetic ideals and how these ideals limit women’s agency.