Sophia Belkin is an artist based in Baltimore, Maryland and was a Spring 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. This interview was filmed at the Joan Mitchell Center in April 2024. 

Solo Exhibition at Hemphill Artworks in DC, January 11-February 22, 2025

Sophia Belkin’s lush and verdant paintings implore the viewer to look closely at the artist’s material exploration and references to nature that are direct and abstract.  Collaged from fabric that is stained, dyed and digitally printed, the various components of the paintings are joined with embroidered seams that mimic the veining on the underside of a magnolia leaf.  Belkin’s studio is filled with remnants of stained fabric from a past life that becomes repurposed through her practice.  Small pieces of screenprinted aquamarine denim repopulate throughout different paintings, like cells multiplying and growing across surfaces. Organic motifs flow over the surface of the paintings like water radiating out from a skipping stone, disrupted only by the occasional miniature image of a moment in Belkin’s day: a TV remote, flower from the garden, or New Orleans artifact may appear, making for a viewing experience akin to a curious I Spy book as the artist melds two worlds effortlessly. 

Slice of Water
March 9 - April 22, 2023

solo exhibition at Dinner Gallery in NYC

Belkin’s work explores the transformation of energy between organic and inorganic materials within the ecosystem. She photographs images that are digitally printed on fabric and then collages them together with ink-dyed fabrics that resemble spliced specimens viewed under a microscope lens. The result is an amalgamation of micro and macro views that fluctuate between abstraction and representational imagery. 

From afar, Belkin’s works reveal themselves as abstracted forms of plants or water droplets outlined by embroidery. Upon closer inspection, Belkin offers glimpses into her own visual diary through closely cropped images of daily objects, nature walks and magnified insects. Weaving these images together with the loose structures of the dyed-fabric, Belkin flattens perspective and makes these two disparate elements interchangeable. The use of materials echo one another and indicate the process of recycling and regeneration. 

Inspired by her time in New Orleans, Slice of Water is Belkin’s poetic response to the city’s relationship with water. Geographically located in an area, where the infrastructure has been constructed, supported, and destroyed by water, she explores the power and omnipresence of nature. The fluid quality of water is mimicked in her treatment of dyes - allowing the pigment to flow or be constricted within her embroidered shapes. 

Belkin’s practice is deeply rooted in environmental cognizance and sustainability. Drawing on the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, she considers ways in which materiality is negotiated within the cosmos. Symbolized by her practice of recycling fabrics and images, Belkin reinforces this concept, constantly changing the state in which her materials and imagery are being engaged. In this way, she compels us to consider notions of how possessions live on long after they are gone from our lives. 

Ground Swell

June 2021 

Solo exhibition at Resort, Baltimore

Ground Swell - If you enter a moderately forested area around Baltimore between Mid-May and June of this year, your senses will be overcome with presence of the Brood X cicadas, a once in 17-year phenomena that temporarily upend the local ecology.  Between the percussive rattle of their song repertoire and the particular palette of their eyes and bodies, it is easy to overlook the less conspicuous (but equally magical) aspects of their emergence. 

Underground, the larval form of the cicada lives in dormancy for over sixteen years, absorbing nutrients and slowly transforming into its mature form.  It then begins a journey upward, tunneling through up to 2 feet of earth to reach the surface.  The pathways traveled by each insect leaves its own set of invisible labyrinthine marks, maps of a journey visible only as a circular fissure disrupting the ground. 

In these unseen states, Sophia Belkin explores the infinite potential of dormancy and transmutation, using dye, embroidery, printed fabric, original source photography and hand-applied marks.  Outside of the lifecycle events marked and charted by science, Sophia questions and gives expansive, visual space to the turbulent, cryptic and alchemical changes that are contained within this unseen phase.

Her work describes  transforming energies from cellular to cosmic and the time that is spent in that process.  Structures waiver between resolution and falling apart, suspended paradoxically in active change.  After a year that the world related very differently to the passing of time, seeds, larvae, cells, stars and things that once felt dormant could be observed more closely and on their own unique timescales. 

Fossil Bloom

Fossil water describes a phenomenon occurring in ancient aquifers confined by an impermeable geologic shell. Without leaks or rain replenishment, the water in these underground caverns remains isolated for thousands of years. As temperatures rise, permafrost melts, and subterranean aquifers are mined for fresh water, previously unknown organisms are resuscitated and reintroduced into the world. Fossil Bloom imagines the rebirth of these ancient life forms as they thaw, twist, and float into the light. 

Solo exhibition at Greenpoint Terminal Gallery

September 2022

The Bog Copper is a small, orange-brown butterfly that inhabits cranberry bogs in the northeastern United States, Canada, and a small area in the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia, where Belkin developed the majority of this series. In the quest for minerals not found in flower nectar, the Bog Copper seeks other nutrient sources like rotting plant matter, mud, or wet soil. This phenomenon, known as puddling, is marked by dozens of butterflies congregating in one spot, creating a single vibrant, moving mass. The cluster often appears to take on a life of its own -- fluttering, hovering, drinking, absorbing matter invisible to the naked eye. 

The pollinator’s search for nutrients is echoed in the wandering line-work of Belkin’s central painting, while other pieces in the show provide smaller windows into the epic narrative. Appearing simultaneously topographic and microscopic, this journey includes detours and pauses within a larger terrain. Belkin's use of dye painting, embroidery, and textile collage reference these natural processes and complex moments of transformation. An allegory of our own experience and role within landscapes, the Bog Copper's travels are fragmented and nonlinear, yet critical in the success of a larger ecosystem. 

Mineral Alphabet is a series of works on paper that explores abstraction and embroidery that takes the form of an imaginary, cryptic alphabet. Each one is unique and contains a combination of watercolor, digitally printed paper and chiffon, silk, linen, handmade paper and embroidery.

This body of work explores the potential of a spring garden where plants are first germinating and growing anew. The term "quicksilver" comes from alchemical terminology and makes reference to invisible, sometimes unexplained forces in nature. 

Peeling Shadows

Solo Exhibition at Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles

June 2022

Both ethereal and earthly, Sophia Belkin’s paintings are portals into observation and meditation inspired by forms and ideas that exist in one’s own backyard. Referencing the natural processes of horticulture, germination, and disintegration, each abstracted landscape presents a concentrated view into organic worlds filled with ever changing light and shadow, sublime surfaces equally mysterious and observational. Made from an accumulation of original and sourced photographs, fabric scraps from previous projects, machine embroidered drawings, and hand-dyed fabric, each work is layered and manipulated until an asynchronous sum of parts becomes suddenly harmonious.

Each work contains a nonhierarchical amalgamation of personal photographs taken in Belkin’s own garden, on neighborhood walks, or while visiting a local community garden—new recreations that blossomed during the pandemic lockdown. Belkin begins with dye painting on wet linen—a technique that is free-flowing and unforgiving. Slicing up photographs printed onto polyester and chiffon, Belkin stitches these excerpts of everyday life onto newly dyed bio-cosmic backgrounds using a CNC embroidery machine. Greens, blues, and browns appear throughout each work in reference to the natural hues found in the earth and beyond. Belkin’s surreal compositions are a delicate balance between the tactility of the hand and the uniformity of the machine—a process-oriented union between the natural and the synthetic that reflects the permeability between oneself and one’s environment.

In each painting Belkin zooms between macro and microcosmic, exploring the physical patterns of each leaf, stem, and bud, as well as the frozen compost created from and for these biological forms. An untamable shift of light, color, and space flickers through the work, allowing viewers a chance for introspection on Earthly delights, the shared responsibility in caring for them, and of course how to enjoy them.