Sonia Gomes works with sculpture and installations made from diverse materials, such as clothing and furniture, and plays with the potential spiritual combinations between them. Her compositions emerge from a spontaneous and casual practice of deconstructing and reassembling the everyday objects that cross her path. These works are created through a process guided by rare intuition, breathing life into things and proposing new meanings for them in the world.

These amalgamations carry vestiges of previous existences, with each part contributing to the whole through a dual process—both in their physical properties and their historical weight. Expressionist, organic forms arise from the decomposition of affective objects, invariably conjuring a vision of pulsating life formed from the combination of different experiences and memories. Gomes creates intricate and meticulous contortions with fabric, exclusively using handcraft techniques. Every seam or fold stems from vernacular processes, aiming to transcend the notion of the ‘popular’ by blending the naïve—resulting from her informal and self-taught background—with the erudite, reflecting a precise eye and deliberate gesture. Her work fuses the traditional and the inventive, the readymade and the authorial, to forge an affective, aesthetic, and political redistribution of art’s materials, meanings, and outcomes.

Within this entanglement of memory and intuitive materialisation, biographies find tactile and organic escape routes, exploring new and vibrant ways of existing.

In 2018, the artist had her first major institutional solo exhibitions in Brazil, at MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo and at MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio de Janeiro. Her work has also been featured in institutional group exhibitions such as Front International 2022: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA (2022); the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2015); Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2017); Revival, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, USA (2017); Art & Textiles – Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2013); and Out of Fashion: Textile in International Contemporary Art, Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark (2013).