SOPHIA CARDILLO

The act of bearing life is inherently creative, inviting meaning-making from the desperation, joy, loss, and love encountered through conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. My artwork explores how caregiving and creative practice inform and inspire each other.

Following a pregnancy loss in 2024, I pivoted from conceptual work to the intuitive medium of collage, visually processing what I couldn’t yet articulate in words. My multidisciplinary practice adapts to the rhythms of caregiving, using materials like postpartum care objects, magazine cutouts, and my grandmother’s fabric stash—portable and “child-safe” for work at the dining table or playground. These materials not only reflect the constraints of caregiving but embody its messages: cutting and weaving postpartum underwear into soft sculptures like baskets and pillows signifies the dual need to nurture both our vulnerable and powerful selves. Through quilting techniques and fabric, I honor the artistic legacy of mothers before me, including my grandmothers—avid makers who, like many women of their time, never called themselves artists.

My work documents my bodily experiences while questioning how communities care for maternal bodies amid the profound physical and emotional transformations of motherhood.

Sophia Cardillo is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and doula. She creates work in textile, collage and performance art film, that provides form for the bodily experiences of giving, loving and suffering as she herself carries out her roles of mother and caregiver. In addition to serving parents through the entire perinatal period as a doula, Sophia facilitates support groups and healing, somatic storytelling workshops around themes of embodiment, mothering and creativity for artist and parents. She collaborated with the Novelty Arts Collective to design and facilitate a Mother’s Day Art & Craft Market of all mother vendors in May 2024. Sophia is a member of Flock Artist Collective, a group of artist mothers and caretakers, showing their work annually in Pittsburgh, PA Since 2022. She earned her BA in Urban Studies and Theater from Wheaton College, IL in 2015. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and three children.