About

Sophia Zotti is an Italian American from West Palm Beach, Florida. She is a visual artist working primarily in oil painting and textiles.Her work has also been shown at the Motlow State Art Gallery. In the spring of 2025 she exhibited her Seasons of Eden at the Andrew Todd Art Gallery at Middle Tennessee State University. In the fall of 2024, Sophia’s work was featured in MTSU’s Collage magazine. Sophia graduated in the summer of 2025 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Currently, Sophia teaches private drawing and painting lessons. Sophia’s work consists of representational and abstract pieces. She plans on earning her MFA in the near future.

Artist Statement

My practice engages oil painting and textile work to explore themes of grief, embodiment, and the social narratives surrounding women’s bodies. Grounded in personal experience, my work aims to create a space of shared recognition—where intimate emotions and private histories intersect with broader cultural dialogues.

Through layered surfaces and material contrasts, I investigate how physicality and vulnerability are encoded in the body. The act of making becomes both a meditative and political process: stitching, painting, and constructing serve not only as formal strategies but also as ways of processing loss, memory, and identity. My use of textiles—often associated with domesticity and femininity—deliberately challenges hierarchical distinctions between fine art and craft, allowing for a reexamination of value and visibility within artistic traditions.

I am influenced by the visceral materiality of Kim Dorland, the socio-political provocations of Ida Applebroog, and the emotive tactility in Tanya Aguiñiga’s fiber work. These influences, combined with my own narrative, form the basis of a practice that seeks to make visible what is often hidden: the lingering impact of grief, the complexity of the female form, and the quiet power of lived experience.