One key experience of the lived body is the function of breathing. ‘Breath 1’, a colour video installation, presents the midrift of the torso in its continuous rising and falling breaths. Flattened on a digital screen, this is a shifting form, an expanse of pink flesh fringed above with a narrow finger of white space. The undulating line separating fields of colour, two smoothed ridges at the base of the rib cage, is our only register of movement. And it is a steady movement, yet the isolation of the body section within the frame gives little indication of whether it takes place in real time or at a slowed pace. Whether shallow breaths made deep, or deep breaths deepened, the breath, once imaged, allows a contemplation of gentle repetition in its most silent form....
Surveying the breadth of her works dealing with the body, there is a great deal that may be said about how the body might bear out particular shades of meaning for the artist. The body as it is known and used in her works clearly betrays what (in my view) is a rightful conviction in its very centrality as the locus of experience....
...Her descriptions of the body in its world – demonstrated, for instance, through the sketching of bodily movement in space – play out the famous declaration of Edmund Husserl to ‘return to things themselves’.

In a significant sense, the open-endedness of her visual sequences, such as ‘Breath 1’, allows Sonia to have opted for an alternative to the “derivative sign-language” that too easily structures ‘figurative’ works. It is as if by isolating the moving rib cage,...we escape the need to use visual devices that suggest body, and instead go directly to the body itself.