Archive of work by graduates from the renowned MFA Programme at GSA

Sofia Sefraoui

Born in 1990.

Lives and work in Glasgow.

As a consequence of a multicultural background, Sofia has always been interested in cultural heritage and hybridity. Being half-Moroccan and half-Brazilian, she started questioning the concept of cultural belonging within her artistic practice. Sofia gather materials and tries to associate them in order to create tensions and unusual displays.

Sofia Sefraoui works with materials that have opposite characteristics and belong to different categories. She is interested in the material physical aspect, as well as in its narrative and symbolism.

She believes that these two ways of approaching mediums are highly intertwined, as she gives importance to the social and cultural impact that materials can bring to her works.

She often uses fabric – from different countries and with different histories and patterns – that she associates with harder materials, such as metal and wood. She enjoys putting together materials that come from dissimilar backgrounds.

She often refers to her practice through the metaphor of weaving. Somehow, the act of weaving refers to the construction of a network, with a strong basis (bare-threads) and important connections and associations (knots). The use of fabric in her work refers to her deep interest for the social fabric, and the notions of construction, representation, and culture. When she mentions culture, it envolves the idea of mixed-cultures, travels, encounters, displacement, longing and belonging. These ideas are at the chore of her practice and she always attempt to associate them, creating at times, moments and spaces of betweenness, of friction and changes.

This reminds her of the notions of tension, balance and harmony. Within her own practice, she tries to create confrontations, tensions, that can, in a bigger scale, create an harmonious piece of work, sometimes joyful, and glomy all at once.

The finished works are usually a balance of composition, physical aspect of the materials and history. By history, she refers both to the histories that the materials and the way they are associated can tell, as much as an historical (and political context). She believes that her practice embraces different notions and can be polysemous. She enjoys its abstraction and openness, as she feel s it leaves room for interpretation without being vague.