Meet Sophie Sundaram ’26, Emotional Detective

For years, Sophie Sundaram ’26 has tried to answer two questions: What does it mean to really know another person? What does it mean to truly know yourself?

To accomplish this, the studio art major has been engaging in what she calls “emotional detective work” – from trying to guess the tone of her mother’s reading material based on her facial expressions and reading stream of consciousness stories from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to falling in love with international arthouse cinema and the work of filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The ultimate goal: to understand emotions — the way they shift and change and how they can be used to solve the mystery of who a person truly is beneath the surface.

With the onset of the pandemic and the rise of videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom, more interactions than ever are taking place on screens, which offer close-up images not only of the person on the other end of the connection, but also of oneself. It’s a more intimate interaction than humans are used to, Sundaram explained, but because of the screen, it’s also more distanced and curated, constrained by the borders of the camera.

“I became really interested in how the screen shapes emotional visibility and that kind of tension in the clarity and distortion – meaning, what we're seeing and what we think we are seeing when we're communicating with others,” Sundaram said.

This interest became the foundation of Sundaram’s first solo body of work. Through the College’s Weiss Summer Research Program, she spent summer 2025 zooming into the emotions of herself and others through a camera lens, and trying to understand their complexity off the screen via art.

Looking inward

Like many who live far away from loved ones, Sundaram makes a lot of video calls, talking to her parents in Concord, Massachusetts, her sister in Belgium and her extended family in Poland. But over summer 2025, instead of simply talking to them, she also used the calls to document her emotions. While FaceTiming daily with her sister and parents (who were abroad for most of the summer), Sundaram would take screenshots or videos of the call, then use the images to later draw a self-portrait. Sometimes the self-portraits were neutral expressions of everyday conversation, while others displayed more distinct feelings, like happiness or sadness. Drawing a portrait of herself crying after receiving a piece of bad news, for example, was emotionally charged for Sundaram and for her viewers at her end-of-summer critique.

“I think one of the reasons that people resonated with that one is, how often do we actually slow down enough and sit with the discomfort of somebody who is crying, who's in distress, who's sad?” she said. “Sadness is still quite taboo in some ways. Even though you can find a hundred people on Instagram who are crying, there is something about that that is very packaged, you can flick through it and it feels very commercial. When you draw something, you have to sit with it. There was some uncomfortableness with actually looking at myself crying, and having to sit with that and draw it.”

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Sundaram's piece "Cry," a series of self-portraits made from a recording of herself crying.

Using a variety of materials, including charcoal, ink, oil bar and acrylic pours, on varied surfaces, such as vellum, plexiglass, paper and canvas, Sundaram was able to experiment with breaking down the idea of curated images that are common on social media and capturing the emotional intensity and ambiguity she was experiencing. Sometimes that meant breaking free from the rectangle shape of screens. Other times, it meant tearing up a piece she was dissatisfied with at the prompting of her advisor, Assistant Professor Leslie Schomp, and creating something new.

“A certain kind of emotional moment, expression, light, [or] gesture would grab me, and then I'd break it down, trace it, draw it, layer it, cut it apart,” Sundaram said. “And from those fragments something new and emotionally resonant would kind of emerge.”

“She learned a lot about materials through trial and error. There are some things you can teach about materials and sometimes you just have to try it,” Schomp said. “I'm really excited when she'll take a prompt and interpret it. It's a fine line between being lost and doing what somebody tells you, and having an intrinsic sense of what you need to do for yourself, because you are the artist and you're the author of this work. Often she interpreted my responses and used the ones that felt most connected to her.”

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Sundaram used a variety of materials, including charcoal, ink, oil bar and acrylic pours, on varied surfaces, such as vellum, plexiglass, paper and canvas, to make her body of work.

The act of creating art itself also invited Sundaram to slow down long enough to pay attention. Whether it was drawing, doing photo transfers or slowing a video clip enough to see how her emotions changed, she was able to notice more than if she was just taking a photo or video alone.

“I think in a really rushed and curated world, attention becomes really radical. I mean, I think about how hard it is for a lot of young people to pay attention to even a whole movie these days,” she says. “So drawing and making art in general, even when it's from photographs, is really important, because it makes space for that emotional slowness, for trying to understand that ambiguity in a different way.

“In a world of AI-generated summaries and curated social media personas and dating apps that kind of promise quick compatibility, I'm really interested in resisting that cultural impulse to package ourselves cleanly,” she continued. “So I feel like one of the things my project is asking is: What if we allowed people to be unfinished and contradictory and hard to read? What if we found some kind of beauty in that?”

Looking outward

But all this time spent looking inward at her own emotions left Sundaram feeling very alone, even when among others. During the summer, Sundaram was on a train ride back to campus after visiting a friend, when a couple on the train caught her eye.

“I suddenly felt very alone. I was the only person on this train by myself,” she recalled. She covertly snapped a photo of the pair. “I had this feeling of sadness and loneliness, and being stressed and being a little outside. These people were so completely within their own bubble, and yet my own emotions were kind of influencing how I saw them. The photo that I took felt in some ways very emotional, more like my emotions than maybe their emotions.”

This moment unlocked the next step in her project: a series of images of strangers she saw when riding the Worcester-Fitchburg commuter rail. Sundaram snapped photos of different groupings of people – those traveling alone, couples or other pairs, and families in threes – and then created photo transfers or portraits from the images. This portion of her work wasn’t part of her initial plan, but it made a significant impact on her art.

“Sometimes you have to just follow other trails that weren't planned,” Schomp said, “and I think she's someone who's very good at doing that.”

“It kind of got me out of myself. One of the things I struggled with in the beginning was just feeling really isolated because I wasn't working in a lab. I didn't have a partner for my project. There was nobody else in the studio except for the people who were painting the floors and walls, and so that really helped me,” Sundaram said. “I would go out every week, and I would take pictures on the train rides and around the train stations. It kind of got me out of my own shell, and it also helped me explore this idea of emotions and others, and how those are filtered.”

Noticing strangers’ emotions and creating art from them also helped Sundaram better understand her own. She reflected on how much of her own emotions colored her perceptions of others’, and also how she can use that understanding to better connect with people.

“Knowing others is also knowing yourself,” she said. “I think one of the things we always want when we get to know somebody – when we fall in love, or when we meet a friend, or with our families – we would love to know what they are feeling. We'd love to know what they're thinking. It’s so hard to do — it's almost impossible — but it's also something that's worth trying. And so I think one of the overarching themes in my work was this idea of what it means to try to know somebody, to try to know what they're feeling, to try to empathize with them, to try to feel what they're feeling.”

Moving forward

At the end of the summer, Sundaram invited others to experience those emotions at an interdisciplinary critique. Faculty, staff and students across departments such English, science, art and administration attended the critique to share what pieces they thought were emotional and why. 

“I think she's bridging worlds with this project,” Schomp said of Sundaram, who also noted literature, philosophy, psychology, film and photography as influences on her work. “Some people really responded to things that echoed their lives in an autobiographical way. And then some people [reacted to] the materiality, the direction of mark making, or seeing it several times in a row. Sophie was able to cue into different possibilities, and that felt interdisciplinary. You can think of emotion in an interdisciplinary way.” 

In addition, Schomp said that the summer research experience also taught Sundaram about the discipline, process and emotion that goes into creating a body of work – which she will be doing not just once, but twice this year, in her senior seminar and as a Fenwick Scholar. Her summer research project gave Sundaram the practical experience needed to take on the upcoming projects and the inspiration to continue.

“One of the things that I was a little worried about is that the project would exhaust my interest in emotions. It really didn't; it deepened it,” Sundaram said. “The closer I came to finishing the body of work, the more ideas I had. Like, the night before my critique, I was still making new stuff. Each piece gave rise to new questions.” 

And for Sundaram, those questions always come back to the feelings of being seen and known – by yourself and others.

“I would love to have these moments where people look at the art and they feel like somebody else has noticed or is feeling something that they are feeling, too,” she said. “I hope that people feel less alone in their emotional depth and less alone in the intangibleness [of emotions] from seeing my work.”