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 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.

These works come from a series of etchings Westerman completed in 2017, entitled ‘Close Distance’. The work was made in the months after her father died from an eight year battle with Motor Neurone Disease and reflect the feelings she and her family were processing at that time including that of grief, closeness and isolation.