For contemporary artist Sofía Ortiz, her work is a survival kit for an ecocidal, capitalist world.
I see my role as a “re-organiser of things”. We think of nature as something outside of ourselves, but everything around us is natural. My sweater was once a sheep; the sidewalk was once a mountain. My practice turns around interconnectivity; it’s an ancient idea, yet one that needs constant tending.
Take us to the beginning of your story. How did your tryst with art begin?
There is phrase I once heard that I have taken to heart – I never began making art, I just never stopped. As a child, like all children, I loved to draw. I loved copying from an old fairy-tale book that belonged to my mother. Later on, I would become obsessed with trying to copy a drawing exactly – Gauguin, Dürer, Michelangelo – the books that were around the studio I took classes in. When I got to Yale University, landing in studio classes felt extremely natural, though I began by studying biology and art history. It just sort of happened that once again I didn’t stop, eventually graduating with an art major. My thesis focussed on drawings made in anatomical and biological labs, and since then I have worked by observing nature. I have had the change to travel to a number of places through this interest: an internship as a scientific illustrator in Rio de Janeiro, drawing rocks in Columbia and potted trees in Shanghai. In 2017, I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in painting. Since returning to Mexico, my home country, I teach figure drawing and continue to work mainly by looking at plants.
Grid. Contemporary artist Sofía Ortiz.
What is the primary role of an artist? How do you describe yourself in the context of challenging people’s perspectives via your work and art?
I don’t believe in there being one role for artists. There are many roles and activist, channel, and individual are a few that come to mind. I feel my role constantly changing within my own work. Currently, however, I would say my work is escapist: an open pressure valve for surviving a late-capitalist, ecocidal world. In one sense, I’m building spaces I’d like to be lost in: lush, beautiful and intertwined. However, since my work, however fantastical, is always derived from an observational practice, reality has a way of sideling in. I can’t help pointing out the tender and stupid way we relate, as humans, to nature. We cut ficus into cubes and put shoes on dogs. I also think a lot about how we categorise the world; in this sense, I also see my role as a “re-organiser of things”. We think of nature as something outside of ourselves, but everything around us is natural. My sweater was once a sheep; the sidewalk was once a mountain. My practice turns around interconnectivity; it’s an ancient idea, yet one that needs constant tending.
Let’s talk about the evolution of your practice over the years. Tell us about your commitment to your current medium.
Drawing has always been the backbone of what I do. Whenever I feel lost, I can always trust myself to find my centre with a pencil and a piece of paper. I worked in oils all through college, and it wasn’t until midway through my last semester that I picked up watercolours. Something clicked, maybe because it is a halfway house between drawing and painting. Now, I have been working with them for close to ten years; we’re in long term relationship, so to speak. I found myself making my paintings bigger and bigger, until finally I realised I wanted to get rid of the paper and use the wall as a giant canvas. I started using cut outs and finding other ways, other materials, to make the images happen – weaving, wood, found objects – though still through the lens of painting.
Detail Meseta II. Contemporary artist Sofía Ortiz.
What inspires you? Take us through your process and continuous frameworks of reference.
Rocks, plants and animals are never too far from my mind. I feel a constant need to share the sense of awe that overcomes me when I think about the millions of creatures interacting in the world. I find it extraordinarily curious that most of my cells are willing to cooperate with each other. Scale that up to a relationship between a moth and a cactus, or an entire ecosystem, and the mind reels. Similarly, thinking in different scales of time – considering the life-span of my intestinal flora, or that some mountains are actually quite young – helps me contextualise my desires, my pettiness, my self-centredness. My life is a “poof” in time; realising this helps me feel free, more generous, and kinder.
Fantasy is also mostly present in what I do, even though it’s a fantasy wrestled from real-world observation. I love drawing things obsessively, and I always start by drawing through observation. At times, what I want to draw is not easily accessible, I have reached out to labs to get close to the specimens I need. I have repeated this model in the United States, Mexico and Brazil. Recently, I have been much more content drawing things at hand. I did a series of drawings piecing together fragments I found after the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City. I have spent the past year on a project detailing urban flora. I need to draw what I see. Even though I firmly believe that truth is always stranger than fiction, there’s a kind of ownership that happens through drawing. In this sense, anything I draw becomes a reference, and my labour consists of organising information in a “just such” a way.
Talisaman 1. Contemporary artist Sofía Ortiz.
Let’s talk about your career, or if you prefer artistic journey. What were your biggest lessons and hiccups along the way? Which is the most memorable moment?
The lesson I am still learning is giving yourself permission to do whatever you want to do. I can trace most of my professional successes to the times I have been honest about what is important to me at the moment. The times I have failed are when I’m trying to guess at what others want from me or from my work. Also take yourself seriously. I feel like that one is particularly relevant to female artists.
How do you balance art and life?
As a Taurean I was born with the ability to be a good organiser. In that sense, it has never been that hard for me, though I do always feel I could be working more.
How do you deal with the conceptual difficulty and uncertainty of creating work?
I am fortunate to have a strong support system. ‘Artists’ is a precarious profession, made even more so by a world that increasingly favours maximising short-term results. The type of studio practice I have, mostly solitary, is often solipsistic; I’ll turn a corner and find myself back at where I started. This kind of languid circling is highly undesirable for a market predicated on constantly generating “more” of something. Many times I don’t deal well with the nature of what I do. It takes work to ignore the prevailing cultural narratives around success. It helps when I remind myself that I am not my productivity, that my ties to the world lie in the people I love, and that my tiny life-span is really of no consequence, in a beautiful and exhilarating way.
How does your audience interact and react to your work?
I think the aesthetics of the work captures people first. It’s generous work in the sense that it doesn’t, for the most part, require mediation. It also invites people to linger. People will often say that my work is beautiful and I have struggled from time to time with that stigma – beauty is often equated to a lack of substance.
What are you looking for in artists’ work?
I’m looking to be stirred.
You have spent time amongst artists in flow, what have you observed?
They tend to smoke too much.
Talisaman 2. Contemporary artist Sofía Ortiz.
What are you working on now? What’s coming next season?
I’m just wrapping up a year-long grant given by the National Foundation for Arts and Culture of Mexico (FONCA – Young Creators). Many avenues opened in this process, mainly having to do with moving from a flat to a dimensional space, as well as incorporating a broader array of references. I’m looking forward to continuing this exploration within a residency I’ll be doing at Vermont Studio Center in February 2020.
Before you go – you might like to browse our Artist Interviews. Interviews of artists and outliers on how to be an artist. Contemporary artists on the source of their creative inspiration.