Artist Sofia Gonzalez brings her new exhibition Becoming Home to the Museum! Running June-September 2025.
On Saturday, June 28, from 1 pm - 3 pm, Sofia will host an artist demonstration of how she uses native plants to dye the textiles she uses in her artwork. Sample textiles will be available for visitors to try their hand at natural dying techniques.
About Becoming Home
As a maker, I feel an urgency to record the places I have known to embody the way these locations shape me and the way I feel within them. Collecting flowers, hulls, and barks from the environment in which I live, I boil plant materials to release the inherent colors of the land. I use natural dyes to stain textiles to create a physical representation of a specific time and place. Sewing, wrapping, and layering naturally stained textiles focuses my restless mind as I respond to the fear of what may happen when a place changes.
While much of my work considers my sense of place and how we build this feeling, this year my own physical body became someone’s home. Using collected materials, obsessive wrapping, and data from our time in the hospital, I wrestle with how to understand this vast change and how to keep time as it becomes ever more intangible. The physical idea of home expands and alters as I became a home for another within our shared greater home of our outside environment.
Inspired by the parasitic, yet symbiotic relationship between oak apple wasps and oak trees, Invasive Attempts artworks consider potential reciprocal relationships with and within landscape.
Gall wasps rely on oak trees, their host plant, for survival. By inducing galls on the branches of oak trees, gall wasps lay eggs and support growth through early stages of life. While the gall wasp uses the oak tree for its own gain, it is believed that very little harm occurs to the tree. What is left after the wasps have matured and taken flight are oak galls: round, porous balls that dry and fall to the ground after the wasps no longer need them.
I collect fallen oak galls to use as a natural dye source, as well as a form for inspiration. Oak galls are both native to our landscape and a result of a parasitic reaction. Using silk dyed by neighboring plants, both local and invasive, I repeatedly wrap oak galls. Wrapping becomes a ritualistic act that quells anxiety while suffocating the gall in a protective hug.