Sophia ……Bassett

My world is made of chairs that carry the souls of tradition before me. Their legs are worn from use, their backs slightly crooked, like the spines of the women who sat in them for years. Quilts embedded with grief, hand-sewn with tenderness and ritual. I hold these things close. They are heavy with inheritance, but also soft, worn down by time and touch.

I work with domestic forms because they are quiet, often overlooked. I flatten them, pressing chairs into a kind of stillness where function slips away and only presence remains. What happens to a chair when no one sits in it? What does it become when it’s made into a print, a shadow, a trace? I’m interested in that in-between space, where the object loses its usefulness and becomes something else: a symbol, a memory, a question.

It moves sideways, resists clarity, and makes space for softness without submission. I was taught that women are to be soft, be useful, and be quiet. I press against that. I rework the forms I’ve been handed. I lean into expected feminine roles: nurturer, mender, keeper of the home, just long enough to understand them. Then I take them apart. Re-stitch them. To imagine softness with sharp edges. To let care exist without performance.

It’s shaped by the tension between comfort and constraint. It's the hardwood floor I lay on as I orient myself in the comfort of expected feminine roles, but not so much that I forget to define my own role.