HEMPHILL is pleased to share the latest review of SOPHIA BELKIN for East City Art by Claudia Rousseau.
It probably took a couple of generations of women needleworkers to sew the magnificent embroidered narrative scroll known as the Bayeux Tapestry in the last quarter of the 11th century. Viewing Sophia Belkin’s first solo show at Hemphill Gallery brought this to mind as her glowing works are pieced together by stem stitching, not made by the hands of nuns, but by an amazing machine that makes it more perfectly and in an instant of the time. The issue of mechanical help in creating works of art is one that has been recently in focus, but there is an enormous difference between enlisting a CNC embroidery machine to carry out your complicated and detailed designs and using AI to originate a work. And the results shown in this exhibit are fascinating.
After about spending about six years in New Orleans and learning to love the swampy humid atmosphere of the Gulf coast, Belkin currently lives and works in Baltimore where she had previously completed a BFA in drawing and printmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. However, her interest in fabric and embroidery originated a few years later while working in a small yarn-dying shop where she was permitted to use the store as a studio after hours. Becoming increasingly interested in working with fabric and fabric dyes, she took a digital-embroidery course in 2017 that eventually enabled her to operate the CNC machine. As her technique developed, she began to use a multi-stage process to create works like the ones in this exhibit that are very much dependent on a freedom for changes and chance combinations.
As she related in a short video taken during her residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans last spring, Belkin begins working by assembling selected pieces from piles of fabric in the studio, primarily denim and linen, that are either left over from previous sessions or purchased new. Some of them were already painted, using fabric dye like watercolor and letting it bleed. Others the artist then paints with dye, prints designs or parts of digital photographs on them, or applies other techniques to the pieces. She then intuitively cuts them into shapes, laying them out on a cotton paper backing that makes the collage ready for the embroidery machine and the finished work. After the embroidery is done, the backing can be ripped off, and the fragile collage is framed without other backing. This lends to the luminous appearance of these works, the sense of translucency, and the feeling that the forms are moving in a liquid medium, like looking through the surface of a lake.
Belkin professes that her inspiration in creating these fabric collages “has always come from nature. I like that contrast between the fluidity of the water elements of painting that are unpredictable, and the tightly controlled embroidery parts.” The large Seasons of the Swamp, pointedly titled, reflects Belkin’s affinity for the landscape around New Orleans. She has remarked “I think of things being so lush down there, and color feels more saturated. The humidity in the air actually changes the way things look; it creates an interesting lens that fundamentally alters the way light is absorbed and refracted.”[1]
Over the past few years Belkin has increased the size of many of her collages. One outstanding example in the current show is Fizzy Moonlight, an intensely colored and multi-leveled work that includes shapes especially reminiscent of biological forms, both animal-like (e.g. slithering snakes) or much deeper microscopic entities. All of Belkin’s techniques are evident in this work, which, situated near the front of the gallery on a broad wall, allows the artist’s conjuring of living worlds to become almost tactile.
An interest in science, and especially biology, is not surprising for Belkin as both of her parents are microbiologists whom she credits for that aspect of her work. In the above mentioned interview last fall, she described the dynamics that drew her to that interest. “My parents,” she said, “always talked about science almost through the eyes of artists—the creative process within science, having a hypothesis and researching and testing it. It’s like the creative process in my studio, how I experiment with all the different fragments of fabric. I think if I hadn’t become an artist, I would definitely be involved in the sciences.”[2]
Yet, there is also a distinct leaning toward the lyrical and the poetic in Belkin’s works. It’s first evident, I would say in the titles—such as Wrapping a Sunbeam Around a Pebble—that she gives to every work. However, it’s also in the pinks and purples frequently prominent in the palette, and in the smoothly rounded and leaflike oval shapes that dominate the forms.
Among others, at 80” high Opal’s Shadow is a particularly striking example of Belkin’s lyrical aspect with its floral feeling and its dominantly lavender color scheme.
On the other hand, the much smaller Cotyledon speaks to Belkin’s fascination with biology and in this case, botanical science. Cotyledons are embryonic leaves in seed-bearing plants that supply the nutrition the plant embryo needs to germinate. They are the source of the first actual leaves to appear. The idea of the energies of the hidden life of plants and the mysteries of germination are present not only in the title, but in the leaf-like embryonic forms shifting for space in this work.
About a year ago I reviewed a group exhibit in this publication titled Moving Beyond Beauty: Reverence and Reclamation at McLean Project for the Arts. The exhibit showed the work of five local women artists addressing climate change and other environmental issues. Notable was the fact that although all the work in that show aimed for this content, it all went beyond that in aesthetic expression. I also mentioned the fact that it seemed to me that it was not incidental but critical that the artists in that show were all women.[3]
In the case of Sophia Belkin, the issue of employing the traditionally “feminine” medium of embroidery in her work may also lead to a similar conclusion, although it appears that the technique is enjoying something of a renaissance among a number of contemporary artists both here and elsewhere. In my view, it is the combination of the uniqueness of Belkin’s creative process, and the subtlety of its content that separates her work. Without polemics, she presents the viewer with the intense complexity and beauty of nature, honoring the preciousness of life on this planet.
Click here to read the full article.