Sophie Westerman
(b. 1991, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Sophie Westerman’s artistic practice is centred on printmaking, with a focus on etching and lithography. Drawing influences from architecture and literature, her quiet and minimal compositions often use domestic motifs like homes and quilts to explore intimacy, memory and relationships.

Westerman’s new work for Melbourne Now expands upon the techniques and themes of her 2019 series, i think we were friends once, maybe, a collection of coloured etchings printed on her home press that used architectural forms to express ideas of closeness and anxiety. For Westerman, printmaking allows her to communicate thoughts and feelings that are difficult to convey in everyday interactions. Here she plays with tensions between objects, using facades and repeated forms of different textures and density. Restrained, solemn and somehow tender, her spare shapes appear crowded together by an overwhelming blank space, conveying feelings of attachment and confinement. Westerman’s adjacent writing practice informs her image-making, where her interest in time, place, remembrance, loss and memorialisation carries over into artworks charged with narrative and emotional weight.

Westerman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) from the Victorian College of the Arts (2011) and a Graduate Diploma in Arts (Creative Writing) from the University of Melbourne (2013). She has exhibited in group, solo and collaborative shows across Victoria, with artworks commissioned for the Melbourne Art Tram series as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2019) and the Print Council of Australia as part of their Emerging Artist Award (2016). She received the James Northfield Lithography Scholarship from the Australian Print Workshop in 2015 and is a founding member of 5 Press, a local collective that creates artists’ books using traditional printmaking and book-binding techniques. 5 Press has participated in the Melbourne Art Book Fair, Singapore Art Book Fair and at Sydney Contemporary’s Paper Contemporary.