In a world that is becoming increasingly unsettled, Argentina born artist Sofía Clausse investigates different kinds of systems through art. Repetition, time, language and translation, cycles, weaving, it’s an entangled web of systematic things she uses as material for observation using painting, paper, text, and custom made tools. She has graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently pursuing an MFA at the Royal Academy in London. In her work, the process of art-making and thinking through that process lies at the heart. ‘I am questioning my ways of thinking and making,’ she says, ‘and thus creating an idiosyncratic and personal process’. So the process itself, looking for systems, exploring its possibilities including its limitations, and finding meaning, guides her practice. She’s been exploring this by using text, letterforms, and the system of writing as the material in itself. She can mould, shape and explore the possibilities of these materials to see what they can do and how they could behave. ‘Through transforming, abstracting, or fragmenting, I want to explore the expressions and gestures of how my language, tools, body, spaces, and limitations function. My practice continues growing in spirals, feeding itself from itself.’
SOLD
43 x 80 cm
Collage: Painted Tissue Paper on Fine Art Paper
SOLD
70 x 100 cm
Acrylic, Collage on Fine Art Paper
days and days [yellow] and days and days [blue] manifest her interests. They depict systems of mesmerising infinitely flowing lines that are structured and playful at the same time are part of a larger series where she studies the behaviour of tools. On a very meta-level, this work is about thinking about systems by depicting systems in a systematic way using tools. These tools are custom-made by a friend using a 3D printer. It allows her to attach different brushes or markers and space them out any way she wants, or add as many as she wants. ‘These ones are all about studying the behaviours of tools,’ she has said, ‘how they move, how they want to naturally behave, and in turn how they make my body respond and be limited by them.’ So it’s about the systematicness of these movements of creating. She explains that she arrived at this practice by studying calligraphy and letterforms. ‘The curves and intersections of these shapes come from a sort of muscle-memory from painting letterforms again and again.’
Her Jacarandá pieces exemplify this process. These beautiful collages of organically layered floral silhouettes are pieces where all these interests are foregrounded. Her interest was sparked to start these works when last Autumn, she saw the leaves falling from the trees and covering the pavements in London. It made her think of how at the same time in Buenos Aires, the streets are covered with purple blossom leaves. So even though both cities have opposite seasons, these parallels ignited this process. ‘Flowers and leaves mark the passing of time and cycles in a year, and I like the parallels and differences happening across both hemispheres’.
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71 x 53 cm
Collage: Painted Tissue Paper on Fine Art Paper
SOLD
71 x 53 cm
Collage: Painted Tissue Paper on Fine Art Paper
She started by cutting flowers out of tissue paper without knowing why. And then, a childhood song called Jacarandá by the Argentinian María Elena Walsh came to her mind the next day. Quite coincidentally, she found some other parallels. The song mentions tissue paper ('el cielo en la vereda dibujado está con espuma y papel de seda del jacarandá'), which was exactly what she was using. It also talks about the colours light blue and purple that she was painting the papers with, and the time of the year being now when the flowers blossom. So during the process, she found meaning. ‘All of these connections came afterwards, which surprised me and made me think of them as synchronicities.’ In other words, these pieces revolve around her main interests: time, repetition, cycles, and translation.
Just like the Jacarandá pieces, the Solar Rug is made of tissue paper. This piece can be understood as working in the context of Sofía’s broader interest in textile objects and techniques. These pieces use paper as the main material and parallel lines as a constant gesture. These lines are developed from marks generated by custom-made tools, and as a result of her background and research on letterforms in typography. She refers to the sun because she had been contemplating the passage of time and the sun symbolises that.
Sofía’s work can be understood within the context of ‘Process art’, an artistic movement that sprouted in the US and Europe in the mid-1960s. Within this movement, the process of its making, and everything that it involves, is one of the most relevant aspects if not the most important one. Thus, the process of its making art is not concealed but remains a prominent and visible aspect of the completed work, so the making of the work is an important part or even the whole of its subject.
Some art historians believe this can be traced back to the abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock a decade before. His technique was commonly called ‘action painting’, and less frequently ‘process painting’, was all about the spontaneous expression and direct application of paint. For artists like him, the act of painting itself, being the moment of the artist’s creative interaction with their materials, was as important as the finished work. Sofía moves beyond the sole focus on the process itself. For her, it's also about finding new meanings. As she has said, creating new tools is like creating new dialects or voices: it can help to convey something that could not be expressed before, and through this, find new meanings.
SOLD
70 x 100 cm
Acrylic, Collage on Fine Art Paper
Sofía has been featured in the Financial Times, It’s Nice That, FAD magazine, and Artsy. Her work has been exhibited all over London and the US, amongst others at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2020 and Nationale Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Follow Sofía on her instagram and her website.
Artwork photographs courtesy of the artist. Portraits taken by Alina zum Hebel (website/ instagram). Photography courtesy of where’s the frame? and Alina zum Hebel.
where’s the frame? - ‘PAPER MODE’ is a collection of 6 up and coming London based artists. The collection is available from April 21, 2021 until July 21, 2021.
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