A hint of nature breezes through Sophia Belkin’s urban studio in a graffiti-bedecked warehouse in Baltimore’s Station North neighborhood. As overhead fans turn one end-of-summer day, Belkin’s fabric collages seem to drift across the all-white walls. Within these artworks, pools of pastel colors emerge as if seen through a fog. Appliquéd forms resemble water droplets or leaves buoyed in the air. Patterns flow along cascading or more precise paths. Bound together by embroidery, all parts coalesce in complex arrangements of lyrical balance and beauty.

“My inspiration has always come from nature,” says Belkin. Dressed in a white top and verdigris-turquoise jeans that echo the smoky palette of her compositions, she explains the specialized nature of her art: “I like that contrast between the fluidity of the water elements of painting that are unpredictable, and the tight, controlled embroidery parts.”

A recent exhibit of Belkin’s large-scale paintings at Washington’s Hemphill gallery presented several pieces produced during a six-week artist residency in New Orleans. Belkin reflects on that time in the city where she also lived for six years: “I think of things being so lush down there, and color feels more saturated. The humidity in the air actually changes the way things look; it creates an interesting lens that fundamentally alters the way light is absorbed and refracted.”

While there, the artist took digital photos of swamps and wetlands. Back in her Baltimore studio, those and a wealth of other source materials are transformed into photographic elements in her collages. After manipulating the images on a laptop, she sends them out to be printed on fabric. Later, without any plan or sketch heading in, the artist pulls intuitively from different piles of fabric, selecting pieces that might coordinate with others.

Among the piles are swaths of linen and denim that Belkin previously hand-painted. Treating the dyes as watercolors during that stage, she may have allowed them to spread and blend, perhaps throwing salt on the surface in one of several resist processes. Or, she might have applied a wide brush to the fabric in broad gestures, producing striated, wavy lines and bumps that resemble woodcuts or sedimentary layers.

Her cumulative techniques don’t end there. “It’s not really clear-cut,” the artist notes. “If I start with bigger pieces, I may decide to cut them up, or I might make the collage even bigger by adding smaller chunks.” Once the basic layout is decided—typically on the floor—Belkin moves to her computerized embroidery machine to attach the assembled parts.

In addition, she often takes photos of completed, hand-dyed paintings. Once those images are photoshopped and digitally transferred to fabric, Belkin cuts up and uses the snippets in new works, as the cycle begins again. If results prove unsatisfactory, she may decide to cut up the fabric and recycle it later, observing, “I’ll eventually find a place for every piece—whether in the first iteration or somewhere down the line.”

The studio, in fact, has become its own force in her work. “More and more I find that an ecosystem happens within the studio,” the artist explains. “I think of fabric pieces as having a life of their own—their own patterns and movements and relationships. So even though my inspiration comes from nature, right now I’m working with the nature of the world of fabrics within my studio.”

Over the years, Belkin’s art has evolved toward greater size and increased abstraction. The largest piece—70 inches high and 10 feet wide—suggests her fascination with different ways of viewing. “I like working at a bigger scale because there’s that impossibility of both seeing the big picture and picking out details. You can’t hold those visually at the same time,” she says. Comparing the experience to being in a landscape, Belkin recalls that while growing up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, she spent hours hiking and searching for mushrooms in the woods. “When you’re foraging for mushrooms, your vision is honed in a very different way from regular walking. That’s relevant to the work too—channeling your vision to be narrow or wide.”

The artist first encountered the textile world by chance. A few years after earning a degree in printmaking and drawing from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012, she worked at a small yarn-dying shop. The owner offered her use of the premises as a studio after hours. Working more and more with the material, she took a digital-embroidery class in 2017 that soon hooked her on the technique.

Still, Belkin credits the main inspiration for her visual direction to her mother and father, both microbiologists. As she relates, “My parents always talked about science almost through the eyes of artists—the creative process within science, having a hypothesis and researching and testing it. It’s like the creative process in my studio, how I experiment with all the different fragments of fabric. I think if I hadn’t become an artist, I would definitely be involved in the sciences.”

For more information on the artist, visit sophiabelkin.com.