Sophia Conroy-Iglesias (b. 1999, London) is a British-Spanish artist and designer whose practice centers on the female form as a vessel of myth, intimacy, and memory. Her work, influenced by Old Master drawings, Renaissance drama, and the surreal edge of animation, distills fragments of history and personal experience into charged, symbolic scenes.
Raised between British and Spanish cultures, Conroy-Iglesias approaches mythology not as distant narrative, but as a living lens through which to explore the feminine psyche. She reconfigures familiar symbols, allowing the body to speak through them anew—myth not as escape, but as a mirror.
Within her oil paintings, female figures emerge as both timeless archetypes and deeply personal presences. They inhabit spaces drawn from biblical narrative, myth and memory, yet feel acutely contemporary—confined within the edges of the canvas, bodies press against fabric and ground, yielding and resisting at once. These figures embody a tension between vulnerability and strength, fragility and vitality, creating images that are at once tender, unsettling, and empowering.
Writing runs parallel to her painting. Each canvas is paired with a poem handwritten on its reverse, as if the image itself casts a shadow in words. These texts act as a private key to the work, extending the painting into an interior dimension where language, memory, and vision overlap.
Her background in graphic design, with a BA in Graphic Communication Design from Central Saint Martins (UAL, London), informs her interest in appropriation and visual language. In 2022, her graduate project Shitty Gritty London entered the permanent collection of the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection, marking her commitment to interrogating how image and meaning circulate in everyday life.
Through painting, drawing, and hand-bound books, Conroy-Iglesias constructs visual fables of the feminine—intimate worlds where history, poetry, and flesh converge. Her practice invites us to witness the body as both subject and storyteller: yielding, vulnerable, but radiant with agency.