Sophia Cheng

Economics major, Studio Art minor

I am a multi-media artist that moves through the spheres of digital design, drawing, and sculpture in order to answer questions about memory, the body, and the home: what does labor really entail? As non-participating members in a household, can we truly digest its enormity? My creative process organizes around the medium and repetition: through my labor-intensive process, I seek to replicate the all-consuming aspect of domestic labor through sheer scale and material.

Presently, I draw on my identity as a daughter to create work that pursues questions revolving around homemaking, chronic pain, emotional debt, and the balance between guilt and gratefulness. My work encourages viewers to reflect on the labor contained within their own family unit, and starts a conversation that may either bond or discomfort my viewers.

Vessel / 红包

air-dry clay, acrylic/wool yarn

Jewett Gallery

Vessel / 红包 confronts themes of homemaking, chronic pain, labor, obligation, and love language, particularly through the repetition of often invisible tasks that produce the “final products” that we, as the home’s inhabitants, may take for granted. I am interested in how we see the invisible tasks’ imprint on the homemaker’s body. I take inspiration from the Nüwa myth of creation, Tabitha Soren’s piece Motherload, and my own experience as a daughter of a homemaker into account to create this piece. Vessel / 红包 is largely inspired by my own comprehension of the incalculable amount of time spent and sacrifice required from my mother as she raised my sister and I from birth. I create a near-unfathomable amount of clay bowls by hand, flattening, rolling out, and forming the clay; I then stack the bowls in order to evoke the image of a spine. Each bowl holds time, while also nodding to its erosion. As each bowl multiplies and the time spent compounds, the resulting mass becomes difficult to comprehend, and the true amount of time and labor spent becomes muddled through sheer scale.

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