Why Sofía Ruiz sews real thread into the eyes of her oil painted figures

Sofía Ruiz’s work begins where memory breaks down. Growing up with her mother’s amnesia, she learned early that identity is not something fixed, but something assembled from fragments—some real, some imagined, some missing entirely. That understanding runs through her paintings, where children coexist with strange, ambiguous creatures that feel both unsettling and familiar. By stitching thread directly into the eyes of her figures, she introduces a physical act of repair something fragile, somet