Sonja Weber Gilkey is a Dutch-born visual sculptor, who derives most of her inspiration and materials from the sea. Tactile and moving, her work is a testament to the ocean and its environment. Sonja’s concern for the destruction of the ocean has always been the message of her work: that the environmental impact of pollution and climate change will, and has, changed our relationship to life. At her home in Maine, Sonja is surrounded by the deep power of the sea, activities of the lobster men, their boats, crates, the sound of the fog horns and the eddies of water that go by her wooden cottage. She is called to the ocean, an environment fighting for its life from acidity and pollution and ever increasingly impacted by humans.

From a childhood spent on her family’s boat on the Westeinder Plas, Kudelstaart, the Netherlands, to sailing out to the islands of Maine, living and working with rope has been a lifelong experience. For Sonja, rope sculptures are practical, sensual, meditative. The rope can be handled and transformed as one’s daily manifestations of change. It is universal and used in all aspects of life.

Kundalini permeates everything Sonja does. It is her life and her life’s work in sculpting art. Sonja has been a Kundalini teacher since 1974. Through Kundalini one experiences intuitively ‘I am I am I am.’

Born in Amsterdam, Sonja earned her B.F.A. in Lausanne, Switzerland, before getting her M.F.A. in Sculpture along with an Art Therapy degree from The Art Institute of Chicago. She has studied sculpture with Cosmo Campoli as well as studying ceramics with a Zen master in Kyoto, Japan. Sonja’s work has been exhibited in notable galleries from the Netherlands to New York City, along with galleries near her homes in Maine and Charlottesville.

Sonja’s hope is that her works raise consciousness and awareness about how humanity’s DNA is deeply interconnected to that of the oceans and how the beauty and fragile nature of the oceans needs to be protected and celebrated.