Sophia Narrett employs the slow, meticulous process of embroidery in response to the accelerating pace of contemporary media, transforming a historically domestic craft into a medium for examining the liberties and constraints of modern womanhood. Drawing from images sourced online, she repurposes the visual language of the digital era to challenge how female sexuality and intimacy are framed in mass media. Her densely stitched narratives—rooted in the legacies of American advertising and the Feminist Art movement—unfold as lush, multi-perspective realms of love, desire, and self-discovery, where pop-cultural references and earthly pleasures converge in intricately woven scenes.
In These Days Are Mine to Keep, Narrett traces a transmorphing cycle of marriage, sex, childbirth, and motherhood. The work draws inspiration from Harrison Fisher’s early-20th-century Wedding Series, whose six lithographs follow a couple through courtship, marriage, and the arrival of “their new love”—an infant. Narrett embeds this reference directly: an open book reveals her reimagined version of Fisher’s scene, where a mother in a voluminous white dress and a partly shadowed father lean over their baby. Opposite them, a woman sinks into a pond of lily pads that recedes like raw-edged paper, while a copulating couple becomes the fulcrum of a seesaw. Sex—both essential catalyst and veiled spectacle—emerges as a transformative force, at once obscured and in plain view. Through her intricate stitching, Narrett creates an elastic sense of time, allowing her characters to map an emotional and ontological framework that merges past, present, and future into a single, fluid narrative.