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.
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 practice dwells in the intersection of art and research. I use material culture to untangle the legacies of colony and empire—of violence and conquest, expansion and extraction—and ask what could be if we prioritized care.
I draw from my own perpetually unsettled state as a descendant of Spanish and American colonizers. I grapple with the meaning of that inheritance and the generations of my native Waray and Ilonggo ancestors whose identities were systematically obliterated by the Spanish. I also honor my Japanese grandmother who chose to establish herself in the Philippines and her life of resistance and redefinition.
I explore objects and participate in their design and production to recontextualize a past, present, and future organized around care. Instead of fabulating, I perform what was—sewing a quilt the way my grandmother did, for example—to surface these possibilities that have been buried or lost. I embrace the quiet, careful labor that goes into the making of these artifacts and the ways the connection between maker and user have been disrupted by a changed world. I’m fascinated by the stories embedded in these everyday things.
My process is rooted in the tangible. I work with materials and touch, with stories of love, with memories that have been entrusted to me. It’s my way of insisting that care is a practice and something I enact with my hands, time, and attention.
I draw from my own perpetually unsettled state as a descendant of Spanish and American colonizers. I grapple with the meaning of that inheritance and the generations of my native Waray and Ilonggo ancestors whose identities were systematically obliterated by the Spanish. I also honor my Japanese grandmother who chose to establish herself in the Philippines and her life of resistance and redefinition.
I explore objects and participate in their design and production to recontextualize a past, present, and future organized around care. Instead of fabulating, I perform what was—sewing a quilt the way my grandmother did, for example—to surface these possibilities that have been buried or lost. I embrace the quiet, careful labor that goes into the making of these artifacts and the ways the connection between maker and user have been disrupted by a changed world. I’m fascinated by the stories embedded in these everyday things.
My process is rooted in the tangible. I work with materials and touch, with stories of love, with memories that have been entrusted to me. It’s my way of insisting that care is a practice and something I enact with my hands, time, and attention.