Blog

Sophia Karina English in their studio, 2024

Sophia Karina English (they/them) welcomes me into a cozy bungalow that they share with their best friend and two friendly cats. Their studio is a small room off the hallway where I see a desk pushed up against the wall displaying a work in progress. A notebook lays open next to several square cork coasters that are partially covered with glass beads. English is best known for this type of work—phrases and questions in black block letters set against a white background.

With a cat in my lap, we begin discussing English’s background, artistic influences, and their use of beadwork and text to explore family and cultural identity. English is a Latinx crafts person, sculptor, and performance artist based in Chicago, Illinois. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have shown at multiple local art spaces including Woman Made Gallery, The Martin, Compound Yellow, and Public Works Gallery. They are a two-time participant in ACRE Residency and are currently part of the HATCH Residency at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

From their home studio, English uses beadwork to reference the Latin American tradition of storytelling through beaded textiles. English's work asks questions that grapple with eradicated cultural and personal histories that arose from colonization, poor record keeping, and family secrets.

A work in progress at Sophia Karina English's Studio, 2024

Other Peoples Pixels: Did you grow up in Chicago?

Sophia Karina English: I'm from San Francisco originally. I came straight to Chicago after high school to study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The high school I went to was an art high school in a classical sense. I was in the visual arts program which focused on oil painting and figurative sculpture, and primarily it was about realism and depiction. It was intense for a bunch of kids in terms of the standard that we were working at, but I'm grateful for it. It helps me with my job more than anything, and I like having the ability to do representative work. It also gave me a high standard of quality for myself.

My grandfather was a jeweler and I have an aunt that was trained in jewelry and  photography. She's very crafty and has been a big influence throughout my life. Doing all of that then coming back to this place of craft and existing in that world has been kind of funny, because it's like I went all the way around to come back to the same place.

OPP: In your artist statement you start out by identifying yourself as a multi-disciplinary artist and crafts person. Do you have any defining resolution about the tension between those two things or do they seamlessly coexist for you?

SKE: Within my little niche community, they coexist really well. Everyone that I would call a friend or even a close acquaintance is an artist or creative in some way, and most exist in both the craft and fine art space. It's nice to have people that are coming from the same place as me, thinking about the same things, and who hold both of those communities in the same regard. Beyond that, I've found it has gotten a lot better recently in the way people are talking about craft in general, especially in the fine art world.

I do have a little bit of a comeuppance about it—not bitter, but stubborn about it. I want to talk about craft. That's what I'm interested in, but I want it to be relevant to art, and I want other people to be interested in it. I'm kind of trying to have my cake and eat it too.

A wall within Sophia Karina English's Studio, 2024

OPP: I am especially curious about your beading practice. Similar to other traditional crafts, this skill is often inherited or handed down. Did that come from the jewelry maker side, or do you have another source?

SKE: Beading was something that I encountered at SAIC with kg Gnatowski. I was in a class of theirs which revolved around unconventional weaving, and I took to it in a way that felt good.  My interest developed. I began researching and it snowballed from there.

I’m more recognizable for my beadwork that adheres to surfaces, vaguely inspired by Mexican Huichol Beading. It's not something that I'm coming from at all culturally, but that's the reference that I had. Growing up in California and being Latino in general, it's something that was floating around in my hemisphere. I've adapted it to work for my purposes, but I’m getting to a place where I want to talk about it more in the cultural context of the craft itself.

My family roots are either native in California and Mexico, but mostly I identify with my mother coming from Nicaragua. There's very little cultural information I can get from there because people don't really care to document it, let alone translate it into English. It's something that I always felt like was missing, especially in art school where so many people are talking about their families and culture. I feel like it’s one of the first things that you have to go through as an artist.

Sophia Karina English's Studio, 2024

OPP: Can you talk a little bit more about documenting your family history and frustration with the absence of connections or information? There is something about the beading itself that holds that within it too—a poetic connection between material, process, and context.

SKE: It is extremely frustrating, and it does mimic the conceptual side of that. When I started doing this stuff it felt like such a weight and was deeply perturbing my spirit. The meticulousness was an outlet, and the writing comes into that too. That's usually the part where I feel the most frustrated and stuck, but once that’s done, the beading becomes almost a relief. 

A work in progress at Sophia Karina English's Studio, 2024

OPP: Tell me more about the text itself. There are certain phrases that are a statement, but more often they're questions that remind me of something you'd see on a standardized test. I think the question mark is so powerful as opposed to a period. Is the question for you? Is it for the audience?  

SKE: The questions come from a place of not being able to answer things in a clear and concise way for myself. That's why so much of my work isn't image based anymore. It ties back to the artistic background I'm coming from, my training as a representative or realistic painter. That symbolism is heavy. When I was in school, I was trying to translate what I wanted to say into an image and it just wasn't clicking. It felt cliché and inauthentic, almost like trying to look up the answers which tend to be European in origin, and that felt weird to me.

I decided I'm just going to say the first thing that comes to my mind or the thing that I can't stop thinking about. The questions in particular are my acceptance of not being able to figure this out enough to present it nicely. I have a suspicion that somebody else has to have asked this question before, and they have to be pondering it in the same way that I am. That's why they are still questions, even by the end of the pieces. The grottos are the most recently finished, and they're the beginning of a larger series I'm hoping to develop.

Mothers Grotto and Lovers Grotto River stones, glass stones, plastic beads, plastic charms, glass beads, construction adhesive. 11”x8”x12” and 10”x6”x11”

OPP: They feel like a—not a departure—but something new. 

SKE: I'm starting to think about the role religion has played in my life, and is playing in my life for the first time in a serious way. A lot of my work is about the reality of outside forces, the powers that be, the big “isms” and their effect on my family, my communities, and me.

Religion is the first peak outside of my house. I don't identify as religious, but I have a lot of family members that are religious, and my partner has a relationship with spirituality and religion. I don't necessarily feel that, but I find so much power and grace and importance in it. I've been asking myself, what does my association with these people get me? When the rapture comes, do they get a plus one? In both a general and biblical sense, when someone is thinking about you in a certain way, does that do anything for you?

OPP: It feels like those are more existential questions than the ones that have come before. Your older works seem like more trivial questions about family, yet there is something about them that still feels like it is pondering eternity.

Sophia Karina English's studio, 2024

SKE: The specificity that I usually work with is a little bit of the acknowledgement of how I got to the more existential question. The grottos in particular are me leaning into the more poetic side of these things. What does love by association get me? I'm trying to see what that leads to. On the other hand, the work that I'm thinking about in relation to the grottos is going to get more specific. I like to zoom in and zoom out. There is a triviality and an everydayness to some of the past work that feels like honoring the significance of those moments and the impact of these little dynamics.

Again, it all tends to relate to these things that I keep thinking about. For example, the tabletop piece, And How Long Will It Take came when I got old enough to drink with my family. When my step dad pours me a drink, it's stronger but less alcoholic, whereas if I have the sweeter drink with my mom, there's a lot more alcohol in it. The culture of it has always amazed me. It brings up ideas around strength and weakness, femininity and masculinity. I’m interested in what that looks like in my family and how alcohol plays a role. The familial impacts of alcohol tend to be big, like a pervasive undertone. It’s not something I can pinpoint or fix, and that's how I feel about alcohol in a greater cultural sense. 

And How Long Will It Take (2021) Glass beads, adhesive, metal drink table, rum, shot glasses, wooden board, resin. 48” x 12” x 12”

OPP: Can you talk about the role family secrets play in your work?

SKE: Everyone has family secrets and is a part of keeping family secrets. What I’ve observed is that women in particular tend to keep secrets for other people. As you get older people forget that you don't know something, and I'm at that age where these things keep tumbling out at me. It's nice to have a greater context for what has been happening around you and where you're coming from, but I also wonder how have we been keeping this? What have we lost in the interest of keeping the secret? What intimacy? What history have we put to the wayside?

On my dad’s side of the family, I have a great grandmother that I'm named after. She was Mexican and a farm worker for a lot of her early life, picking concord grapes in California. As soon as I think I'm done with her in my work, she shows back up. She was a woman of a lot of secrets. She passed two years ago now, and there are still things we'll just never know. A lot of that secrecy was her best attempt at keeping her children safe and getting them to assimilate and succeed. You can't really be mad at it, but it's also so frustrating—especially being an artist and someone who's really invested in research and writing. I wish I had a search engine for my family history!

Family Photographs in Sophia Karina English's Studio, 2024

OPP: Let's talk about the Snake Eyed Headpiece. When I look at the pattern, I think of a mantilla, the lace head covering that my grandmother wore during the Catholic Mass. 

SKE: This work was made for a show that paired visual artists and writers together, switching back and forth between the visual artists starting the process, or the writers starting the process. I received a poem from Kelsey Keaton, and which I was supposed to visually respond to. The poem was about the small toxicities that one experiences in relationships, in particular romantic relationships; the things that we do to each other that end up having these very large consequences. I kept thinking about baby snakes. Their bite is more deadly because they release all their poison, and it was a knee jerk response. It led me to this investigation of more decorative beadwork.

Snake Eyed Headpiece (2022) Glass beads, thread. 18” x 14”

OPP: There's something very sensual about beads and how they interact with the body.

SKE: Yeah, they are truly a tactile wonder, and lace is weirdly inescapable, especially in Catholicism.

OPP: Do you have anything coming up at the Chicago Artist Coalition where you are currently in residence?

SKE: Yes, I have a final show in November. I’ll be working with artist Sungho Bae.  He’s in Korea right now, and we haven’t physically met, but I'm really excited about his work. I'm going on a residency next week with Dirt Palace, an artist-run collective in Providence, Rhode Island. It takes place in the Wedding Cake House which is a bed and breakfast that funds an artist residency in the off season. My time will be my own; it's pretty free form. Although I feel a little like the baby bird out of the nest, I'm really excited.

To see more of Sophia's work, please visit www.sophiakarinaenglish.com and follow them on Instagram @craftedconfections.