Artist Statement

Sofia Herr’s work is a personal demystification of the spectrum between simplicity and complexity. It reflects a reverence of the natural beauty of mathematics and patterning while also serving as a way to overcome Herr’s own interior desire for binary, repetition, and order. This sort of meditation allows for investigation of their psyche at a metacognitive level. 

Inherent in their work is the rumination on nostalgia and the transition between childhood and early adulthood. Referencing Plato’s Theory of Forms, Herr examines the banal objects as harbingers of memory, association, and interpersonal energy, utilizing slow, repetitive processes such as knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving, dotting, stitching, scribbling, hashing and rehashing, making and remaking, visiting and revisiting. 

Fiber as a medium allows Herr to explore the valuation of quotidian objects through a lens of sustainability and gender. Through these meditative processes, she references the history of pre-industrial revolution textiles as valuable and vital commodities. Through the use of found and recycled materials, she critiques the current overconsumption of textile products in our capitalist society. By presenting their work in fine art spaces, she seeks to dissect the elitist and gendered trivialization of craft. Herr’s work insists that it is art, but in doing so, it does not deny that it is also craft.