Sophie Westerman

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 houses 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. 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 in Australia, with artworks commissioned for the Melbourne Art Tram series as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2019) and the Melbourne Now Print Portfolio (2023) by the National Gallery of Victoria.