The Coded Cloud features abstract sculptures and paintings by Sophia van Wyk. Van Wyk creates a visual memory bank with cloud shapes coded as timestamps for both significant historical and contemporary social issues including personal dates, events and memories. Van Wyk captures shapes of moving clouds through photographs and sketches and assigns each shape with a code that relates to the time, memory and/or event, then archives it through her art.

She ‘modifies’ the memory or event through interpreting the form or incorporating it with other “memory” clouds. With her sculptures and paintings she is able to change subjectively positive, neutral and negative memories and events through her interpretation, interaction and merging of ‘memory clouds’ to create new stories and memories. Through her artworks

she creates subversive and non- representational biomorphic forms that becomes a metaphor for ‘new meaning and knowledge’ through the unfamiliar.

The use of biomorphic forms, clouds in particular, hold multiple meanings for van Wyk. Because clouds are constantly changing, never static, she sees them as signifying the constant changes in her constructed female identity. Van Wyk specifically work from liminal, morphing and moving forms that refer to an evolving state of flux and change. Ironically the shapes that she creates are solid and static.