Featured image: Home World, Sonia Redfern, 2025, acrylic on reclaimed velvet, 15 x 20 in. / 38.1 x 50.8 cm.
Sonia Redfern’s series on reclaimed velvet bridges the intimate and the infinite, mapping personal memory onto cosmic phenomena.
Sonia Redfern paints cosmic-urban diptychs on reclaimed velvet, exploring memory, time, and celestial connection through layered, luminescent detail.
Using diptychs shaped like the hexagonal mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope, Redfern anchors astronomical events to lived urban experiences. Each panel pairs deep-space imagery with grounded architectural scenes, inviting viewers to contemplate time, distance, and the unseen forces that shape both galaxies and our lives.
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Eight Years, Sonia Redfern, 2025, acrylic on reclaimed velvet, 15 x 20 in. / 38.1 x 50.8 cm.
In Eight Years, Redfern overlays a star system’s cyclical shedding of gas with the familiar rooftop of an old apartment. The cosmic subject, a binary star forming concentric shells of dust every eight years, mirrors the emotional resonance of revisiting a former home. The building stands beneath bursts of fireworks, a symbolic echo of the star’s luminous history. The textured velvet adds a softness to the night sky, amplifying the sense of time folding over itself.
Light-Years Away, Sonia Redfern, 2025, acrylic on reclaimed velvet, 15 x 20 in. / 38.1 x 50.8 cm.
Light-Years Away juxtaposes a crimson stellar nursery with a row of domestic brick buildings, suggesting that the lives lived behind those windows are as layered and mysterious as the cosmos above. The use of deep red hues unifies the galactic and urban scenes, evoking both warmth and unknowability. Redfern’s compositional symmetry and choice of reclaimed velvet blur the boundaries between what we know, what we remember, and what we can only imagine.
All of Us, Sonia Redfern, 2025, acrylic on reclaimed velvet, 15 x 20 in. / 38.1 x 50.8 cm.
In All of Us, Redfern presents a city skyline under violet cosmic clouds, with the suggestion that the same stardust forms both the galaxies and the viewers themselves. The celestial cluster glows with diffuse light, echoing the artificial glow from the city below. This panel speaks to unity across scale, stars, cities, individuals, all coexisting in an interconnected fabric. The title, All of Us, reads as both a declaration and a consolation.
Sonia Redfern’s hexagonal velvet diptychs don’t just show us stars, they show us where we stand beneath them. By tying deep-space phenomena to urban memory, Redfern collapses the vast distance between the personal and the cosmic. Her work asks us to consider the rhythms, celestial, emotional, historical, that continue to shape us long after the events themselves have passed.
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Twin Universes, Sonia Redfern, 2025, acrylic on reclaimed velvet, 15 x 20 in. / 38.1 x 50.8 cm.
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