Sonja Langford (b. 1994) is an artist and researcher raised in the American South. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Connecticut and holds a BA in Art History with minors in Southern Studies and Outdoor Adventure Leadership from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Sonja’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Gadsden Museum of Art (forthcoming), the McColl Center, and GoodYear Arts. Her practice engages with photography, bookmaking, social practice, archival research, and installation, exploring themes of medical history, gender, and power. Through her research on American gynecology, she investigates the intersection of history and contemporary healthcare disparities, highlighting how past narratives continue to shape present realities. Her work seeks to challenge perceptions of visibility and control within medical and historical contexts, bringing to light the overlooked and the unseen.
There is a rhythm to loss, a structure to forgetting. My work traces the ways history inscribes itself onto bodies, onto institutions, onto language. I work with text, material, and form—not to create resolution, but to hold space for what lingers, what resists being erased. The archive is incomplete. The record is not neutral. The body remembers even when history forgets.
My work sits at the intersections of history, medicine, and gender and examines the overlooked and often unsettling narratives embedded within the archives of American gynecology and the persistent impact of its legacy. Through installation, archival activation, and social practice, I investigate the ways medical systems shape bodily autonomy and care, illuminating the widening gender gap in healthcare, studies, and funding. Much of my research is rooted in the American South, a landscape where history is never still, where past and present collapse into one another.
I return to language as both subject and material. I take what is written—medical texts, institutional records, historical accounts—and examine where it fails, where it leaves gaps, where it obscures. Words can be stable or unstable, fixed or breaking apart. I let them unravel, stretch, contradict. The process is slow, deliberate—like transcription, like excavation, like trying to listen for something just beneath the surface.
My work is not about spectacle. It is about presence. Some things are quiet but insistent. Some things sit just at the edge of collapse. I make work that holds tension, that presses back, that asks something of you. Because these histories are still moving. Because these questions are still urgent. Because the body carries what the archive cannot.
I would be doing you a disservice not to mention that I (and by extension my practice) am haunted by a few things: namely the American South, religion (specifically a high control religious group in which I grew up and sometimes refer to as a cult), and the relentless search and reward found in an archive.