Sophia DiLibero
SPLINTER
2019
pine
$3,000
Carved from pine using a chainsaw, and celebrates the roughness of working hands. 6 x 5 x 4
Artist’s Statement
Southern Rhode Island-born sculptor Sophia DiLibero’s work looks as if it crawled out of the beaches and trees of a parallel universe just across the galaxy from the coastal area where she was raised. Anthropomorphic and almost politically scientific, Sophia’s sculptures begin as sketchbook renderings of life in strange motion, whether this life is found around the city or in the sea. Much of her inspiration springs from her childhood fears of mysterious New England marine species and the equally-alien bugs that she would encounter in the summertime. Her work’s investigation of fears that we do not understand lies below the sculptures’ visual surface like would a fish beneath the brackish Narragansett Bay. The molding of her surreal, science-fiction imagination can be credited to artists and writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Guston, and Magdalena Abakanowicz.
An explorer of many materials, Sophia is a graduate oft the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she casts iron, carves wood, thinks with clay, and discovers with foam. Keeping an open mind to the conceptual charge that different materials hold, she uses whatever medium best suits the personality of her piece. Sophia has studied under artists such as Rick and Laura Brown, Marjee Levine, and Chuck Stigliano.