Sofia Ella Quimbo is an artist and researcher who ponders coloniality, displacement, resilience, and gender through the histories, design, and making of objects.

Work ︎︎︎

By Object

By Project/Theme
books
doll collection
monsters
soft power
water

About Me ︎ | InstagramAre.na
Sofia Ella Quimbo is an artist and researcher who ponders coloniality, displacement, resilience, and gender through the histories, design, and making of objects.

Work ︎︎︎

By Object

By Project/Theme
books
doll collection
monsters
soft power
water

About Me ︎

Instagram

Are.na

About Me



Bio

Sofia Ella Quimbo is an artist and researcher who ponders coloniality, displacement, resilience, and gender through material culture. She explores the histories of objects through participating in their design and production to recontextualize a past, present, and future organized around care.

Born and raised in Quezon City, Philippines, she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently an apprentice at the Center for Book Arts. She also maintains a textile arts-based studio practice. She recently received her M.F.A. from Pratt Institute. While at Pratt, she was a graduate fellow at the Pratt Center for Community Development and a graduate assistant of Prof. Shuyi Cao.

Statement

My art and research practice mines historical representations of martial culture and subverts the visual and material language of conquest to surface care instead of violence. I use textiles and fiber to ask what it might mean to organize a world around expressions of tenderness rather than acts of exploitation.

I'm occupied with remaking heraldry, weapons, and armor as soft forms. An escutcheon becomes a quilt. A flail becomes a soft toy. What once projected dominance becomes an object that offers comfort.

Coloniality, labor, and gender are the animating concerns of my practice. I work with and through the tensions inherent in my perpetually unsettled state as a Filipino descendant of Spanish and American colonizers to propose that these objects could mean something else entirely.