Sofia Gonzalez with HereIn

A Field Guide to a Sense of Place, 2014, exhibition at California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA

[Image description: A gallery space with white walls and a gray floor. In the foreground are two sculptures with earthy-colored fabrics draped over structures built of poles. On the back wall, piece of fabric are layered and draped from pins.]

Sofia Gonzalez grew up in Marin County, California, amidst the rolling golden hills, oak trees, and morning fog, and subsequently moved to the dramatically different landscapes of San Francisco; Little Rock, Arkansas; and San Diego. Throughout these transitions, her artistic practice has moved with her, providing a tool for inquiry into ideas of place and the natural environment. Gonzalez spoke with HereIn about her work’s evolution.

HereIn: Looking at your website, it seems your work has been rooted in textiles throughout your career. What initially drew you to the medium?

Sofia Gonzalez: My website represents my work once I’d found my voice during graduate school. In undergrad I thought that to be an artist professionally, one had to paint. My program was quite diverse in media, but the professor I worked with closely was a painter and I think I went to painting because I loved color so much. That was the way I could communicate and play with color easily, by mixing paint. But there really wasn’t anything beyond that that drew me to painting. When I went to graduate school, the first week they asked me, “Why paint?” I had no response. For painters, there’s something visceral about they medium that they love and I didn’t have that. It was very clear within a week and it was one of those career-changing moments. “I don’t have to paint. I can do whatever I want and be an artist.” So I moved almost immediately back to textiles. 

My mom’s a quilter and I grew up sewing with her. We grew up with a studio in our house, which, looking back, was amazing. And my mom was just always a maker. My parents built dollhouses, really crafty things. My mom quilted and taught community quilt classes to school children, and we would share the quilts we made with children who were hospitalized. I also grew up with my grandma, who embroidered, crocheted and knitted constantly. I realized I could do all these things and bring them into my visual language, using them as tools. 

Turn Left Down Lucas Valley Road (Placescape #1), 2013, madder root, lac, mint, rosemary, oak gall dye on raw silk and yarn with steel and walnut frame, 48 x 30 in.

[Image description: A piece of white fabric draped on a frame. The fabric is dyed with gentle orange, green, and pink, and is embroidered with fine yarn.]

So after the “why paint?” epiphany, I brought out all the embroidery things and started sewing. Throughout undergrad I had also learned a lot about the climate change crisis and a lot of my work was about representing, visually, the landscapes that were important to me through more traditional landscape painting. I realized during this change in material that I had been using acrylic paint, which is plastic, to represent the places that I loved so much. The paint would just rush back into the water. I was just adding to the problem and my practice was not aligned with what I wanted to think about. 

Persephone and Demeter Shroud the Meyer Lemon Tree, 2014, pomegranate dye and cotton

[Image descriptionL A piece of fabric, dyed light yellow and pink, is draped over a lemon tree in a garden.]

Textiles drew me to a graduate school class with Sasha Duerr, who is an eco-textile artist and one of the leading natural dye researchers. I just fell in love immediately with the colors, the process, the immediacy with which I could create colors from the actual landscapes I was talking about. The colors themselves became the representation of the land and the places that were important to me. It worked out that all the colors I was trying to make with paint happened naturally through the natural dye. They have a different warmth and depth to them that is not possible in synthetic color. 

You Ask Me Why I Dwell in the Mountain, 2017, silk, cotton, thread, white glue, natural dye, and branches, 6 x 8 x 8 ft.

[Image description: Left: A large textile, made up of smaller pieces of multi-colored fabrics sewn together, is draped from a gallery wall like a tent. Right: A view from the inside the tent, where a tree branch props up the textile.]

HereIn: Place, and particularly home, are at the center of your work. You have moved around a lot throughout your life. How does that shape your thinking about place and why have you felt compelled to follow that conceptual thread throughout your practice’s evolution?

Gonzalez: In grad school I was about to move away from my childhood home for the first time after over 20 years. I realized that home was my family and the physical land, as well. So after growing up hiking and spending time in the backyard, uprooting myself to make those connections elsewhere, alone, was exciting and stressful. The anxiety of that and trying to capture all these memories in the place is a lot of what’s behind my work. I do a lot of research on place theory and how so much of what we do as humans is embedded in place. Even if the artist’s work isn’t as formally about place as mine is, it is always an object and experience of a specific place, because as humans we can’t not be tied to the places where we exist. Home and plants are often tied up in the physical senses— the smell, the air, the temperature, the feel, all of that the plants and colors can represent really successfully. 

The natural dye created a tool I could use to get to know new places. Right after grad school, my husband and I moved to Arkansas for him to go to medical school and we didn’t know anyone. But I had my art and my dye practice. I was able to hike and meet people just through asking about plants, foraging, and walking. It’s a really grounding tool. 

Portraits of North Park: Fava, Loquat and Avocado, fava bean leaf, loquat leaf, and avocado skin/pit dye with alum and iron on silk, 24 x 10 x 5 in.

[Image description: A sculpture hanging on a white wall. It is made up of layered strips of fabric in mauve, pink, gray, and green, which fold over a pin in the wall.]

HereIn: You began a residency at Art Produce— a community art space and gallery, with a garden in the back— right at the beginning of the pandemic. You’ve mentioned that the experience brought to mind questions about what is essential and what is non-essential, and where art might fit into that dichotomy.

Gonzalez: My husband would go to work as a doctor in the hospital and I would get to make dyes in the garden. On a frivolous level, it felt so silly. On a deeper level, it felt so important for me, personally, to stay calm and keep moving. I realized that a lot of people needed that in that moment. You can connect to yourself, to your place, and to others in your neighborhood just by way of going on a walk to collect something. When I was in residence at Art Produce I created an invitation to others— I would send them a call to action and a recipe to create natural dye to encourage them to go on a walk in their neighborhoods. So many people were stuck in their homes, which of course can be good or bad, and I realized that connecting with the environment right outside our door was essential. 

Art can give hope and curiosity, whether it’s the act of making art or just seeing art. I think if we allow space for it, art can impact the other services that we usually deem essential, like medicine. Art can help us have conversations about racial differences, disparities in treatment, the pandemic, just everything. It can help us digest information outside of ourselves. 

Coloring Place, XL, 2020, loquat leaves, passion vine, black walnut, pomegranate, sumac, lavender, basil flower, rosemary, and cochineal dye with alum and iron on raw silk sewed to vinyl, 5 x 3 ft.

[Image desrciption: A textile made up of multiple, earthy-colored pieces of fabric sewn together, like a quilt, in an abstract design.]

HereIn: It’s fascinating that while your materials are so tactile and embodied, for many of your works you’re using Google Maps as part of your process. 

Gonzalez: I started using maps as a reference in 2016. When I moved to Arkansas, a lot of my work was about connecting the colors I created in Northern California, which I felt like I’d just learned about, to new colors I was creating in Arkansas. Trying to bridge the gap between these two homes. Once I wrestled with the fact that “Yes, I will have two homes and now I’ll be here,” I got more specific. I used Google Maps as a way to figure out the landscape and the paths I was walking geographically, and also as an inspiration for the compositions. I’m not a big sketcher. I won’t go outside and sketch the landscape— I work much more abstractly. So I would use Google Maps and take screenshots. I would use the textile scraps I had from bigger projects or from teaching workshops to create a collage based on the Google Maps composition. For example, if I collected Sumac from along the Arkansas River Trail, I would use sumac-dyed fabric to build the composition of that area. It became a good way to memorialize the place and practice being present with it in a different way. To reflect on my time there, the feelings there, the experiences I had created there. But it was much more in-the-moment, which was exciting. It’s quick compared to the process of making natural dyes, which is slow and patient. 

I’m returning to that process here in San Diego. When we moved here, it was like returning to some part of home and some of the colors I’d learned in Northern California, but it’s a whole different place. So again, trying to connect to a third home and what that means. Recently I’ve started to get back into that kind of tactic I set up for myself with Google Maps. In some of the bigger pieces, I’m thinking about South Park and the two mile radius that I’ve lived in for the past year, using the new colors and piecing fabric together to represent the neighborhood. I’m letting myself be a bit looser— looking at maps to understand the geography and the layout of so many human-made lines imposed on the landscape, but also letting the piecing and the stitching reflect my memory of what I think the landscape looks like, too.

Coloring Place, #8, Hillcrest, AR, 5/19/16, 2016, onion skin, rosemary, avocado pits, ornamental pomegranate flower dye on raw silk, silk, and cotton, 10 x 8 in.

[Image description: A framed piece of art on a white wall. The work is made of five scraps of fabric— dyed yellow, orange, pink, and gray— sewn together.]

HereIn: That brings up ideas about how we define place— maps are one of the fundamental tools we use to do that. But perhaps place is far more defined by other things, such as the natural environment. That’s not something we, as a culture, have a lot of knowledge about in our day and age. 

Gonzalez: There’s so much to learn, and I’m challenging myself to learn more about native plants versus non-native. I’ve been doing more research on the Kumeyaay tradition of botany, which we’ve really taken over, infiltrated, and altered. When I think about “place,” the term holds so much more to me than “landscape,” and especially more than “space”— “space,” I feel like, is the colder term of the three. It’s the physical manifestation: the walls, the street, maps that we use to orient ourselves in space. With “landscape,” I always get caught up in landscape painting. It’s less interactive or tangible. So “place” umbrellas everything for me, it defines the location as well as the history and the present. 

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.