From Hertford to the studio: alumna Sophie Ackers on geology and art

4 September 2026

We recently caught up with our alumna Sophie Ackers, whose journey has taken her from studying Geography at Hertford to becoming a full-time painter.

“When I left Hertford, I certainly didn’t imagine that geology would eventually bring me to painting.

I went in what seemed like the more conventional direction: from Geography at Oxford, where I increasingly specialised in geology, to an MSc in Petroleum Geoscience at Imperial College London and then into professional geoscience. Years later, after I had begun painting seriously, I realised that many of the habits I had developed at Hertford were still shaping the way I looked at things.

My current body of work, Subsurface Exposure, explores hidden geological structures and processes – fracture, pressure, erosion, intrusion, compaction and deep time – through large-scale abstract paintings.

I work principally with oil, cold wax, graphite and earth pigments, building surfaces up over time and then scraping, cutting, dissolving and abrading them. Layers are buried and re-exposed. Material is accumulated and removed. A dark line resembling a fault may be the physical edge between two layers rather than something drawn onto the surface.

The finished painting therefore becomes, in a small way, a record of its own history.

My painting Shear Zone developed through this process of repeated construction, disruption and removal. This August it was selected for the Biennale of Chianciano at the Chianciano Art Museum in Tuscany. Earlier this summer, Residual was presented at Gagliardi Gallery on London’s King’s Road, and my work is also due to be featured in La Repubblica Toscana.

More recently I have found myself returning quite literally to geology. This summer I have been travelling through northern Scotland and Orkney, photographing faults, fractures and other geological exposures and, where permitted, collecting small quantities of sediment to bring back into the studio.

I have begun incorporating traces of collected geological material into some of the paintings. I like the fact that the work is no longer simply referring to geology: a small part of that geological history is physically present within it.

Looking back now, the route from Hertford to the studio feels less disconnected than it once did.

I am no longer interpreting seismic data, but I am still interested in many of the same questions: what lies beneath a surface, what happened first, what has been buried or removed, and how much can be understood from the evidence that remains.

Perhaps the biggest change has been learning to build something of my own. The path has been far less predictable than the one I imagined when I left Oxford, but that has also been part of its appeal.

And the thread running all the way back to Hertford is still there: the pleasure of looking closely at something small and discovering that it might contain evidence of something much larger.”