Sophie Coe is an emerging artist residing and practising in Lutruwita/Tasmania. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours from the University of Tasmania in 2025, where she cultivated an autoethnographic methodology in contemporary painting. Her Honours thesis, titled Best in Show, used horses as allegorical representations of women influenced by societal beauty standards, examining the commodification of the female form and the role of beauty as a mechanism of social control. This scholarly work has initiated a sustained exploration of the dichotomy between superficial aesthetics and the internal pressures affecting women’s lives, anchoring her artistic practice in feminist theory and reflective studio methodologies.

Sophie held her first solo exhibition at Good Grief Studios in 2025. In 2026, she engaged in Bett Gallery’s PLATFORM26 exhibition and showcased her work at BUS Projects in Melbourne in the Us as Stars, as Horses exhibition, developed in collaboration with Kamilaroi curator Tabitha Glanville. Her earlier group exhibitions include projects at the student-operated Sunroom Gallery, where Sophie also served as co-chair of the Sunroom Gallery Society and contributed to the curation of Fringe Void as part of Dark Fringe.

Sophie was honoured with the Rotary Emerging Artist Prize and the Bett Gallery Award for her Honours project, and she was a finalist for the Henry Jones Art Prize in both 2023 and 2024. In 2026, she received the Arts Tasmania Professional Development Emerging Artist Grant, which facilitated a six-month mentorship with artist Amber Koroluk-Stephenson and supported the ongoing development of her painting practice.

Through meticulous oil painting, Sophie investigates beauty as a nuanced form of control that shapes behaviour, attention, and self-perception. Drawing on theatrical staging, spectacle, and equine imagery, she uses traditional methods of representation to scrutinise how prettiness can discipline and distract individuals under the pretence of choice. Her work provides a platform to examine who benefits from aesthetic ideals and how these ideals affect women’s agency.