Sofia Reis

Hysterics

Over the past year or so, I have become focused on using fabric, batting, and thread as my primary materials. I occasionally use less conventional materials like egg shells, grass, and menstrual blood. Time has become an important medium for me through the repetitive and meditative motion of hand stitching.

I am interested in exploring the boundaries or lack of boundaries between the body and the outside world/nature. Through intense reflection, my emotional experiences and cycles become a material. I enjoy both the physical and emotional experiences of making my art–I truly love the action of hand sewing and the way my mind finds a rhythm while I work. I am interested in how textiles relate to the body, are almost invisible to us and yet so integral to daily life, can be worn out and mended, are portable, and hold memory. I think about what it is to be feminine or a woman and how those labels both free and bind me. I think about what it is to be messy, to be too much, to be too sensitive.

The processes and materials that I engage with remind me of my family and my childhood. I learned to hand sew as a young child and adored the softness and intimacy of my creations. I was taught and am continually inspired by my mother and grandmother. I lived in my imagination, something that I have lost parts of through growing up, but which I attempt to reconnect with through the ritual of art making. When I sew, I am all my selves at once.

I am inspired by so many strong and defiant artists, a few of which are Tracy Emin, Mary Kelly, Casey Jenkins, Hilma af Klint, Judy Chicago, and Ana Mendieta. Their work is expansive and diverse, and the throughline is an unapologetic, defiant feminism. I love work that confronts the many meanings and experiences of womanhood or the female body. Recently, I have been reading Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Laura Elkin. I have found in it a reflection of myself. Notably, Elkin pushes back on the idea and use of the term abject stating “...most problematically, [the abject] takes the body and repulsion as universal, ahistorical concepts when in fact they are anything but. By thinking about bodily repulsion this way, we avoid having to look at or think about particular bodies–least of all our own” (47). In creating this body of work I have been told it evokes the abject, but as I discuss these pieces I want to make clear that I am thinking specifically about grossness tied to the “feminine”, and embracing it in order to release myself from these arbitrary expectations of constrained embodiment.

@sofia.rose3

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