Keys, a wallet, a crumpled-up receipt is what most people carry in their back pocket but Sofia Elias carries a well-used, spine-broken sketchbook. For the Mexican designer and multidisciplinary artist, this little ‘pocketbook’ as she refers to it, is a record of inspiration, references, materials and ideas that all feed into her hungry imagination.
Elias, who is based in Mexico City, told Wallpaper*, ‘I realise now that when I’m in the studio, even if I don’t see it right away, all my projects connect with each other. A lot of the designing has been about playing with my hands, understanding different materials, exploring how they interact, and how this informs the “use” of each piece. My doodles and scribbles act as the blueprints for my designs.'
Her playful nature and willingness to try – and sometimes fail – with experimenting has led her to create a colourful portfolio across jewellery, park sculptures and furniture, each presenting a new wave of possibilities in form, scale, and materials, and function.
Get to know Sofia Elias
Elias started out in the world of architecture, having studied at Anahuac University in Mexico City. Feeling constrained by the more linear syllabus, it was in her fifth year of studies that she presented a sculptural park titled ‘Jugando a Jugar’, which translates to ‘playing to play’, inspired by children’s play areas and the innocence of unplanned action, reaction and interaction.
These principles have played an important role in Elias’s design process ever since. She says, ‘I like to think that as kids, we were the purest versions of ourselves; always curious, with no boundaries, and without control. My designs try to reawaken these feelings. As adults, we often pretend to have everything under control. My mission is to break that, and it usually works; I almost always get a giggle out of the user.’
In her studio, located in the Roma Norte neighbourhood in the Mexican capital, she started playing around with smaller scale sculptures, and in 2019 launched her jewellery brand ‘Blobb’. ‘I never saw myself making jewellery; to this day, I actually think I don’t know anything about jewellery,’ Elias said. Each ring is sculpted by hand, and without a mould, meaning each design is unique.
Her first chair series titled 'Party of Three' had a more practical origin story. ‘I had just moved studios and didn’t have any chairs that “worked”, all of them were ones you would fall on to, or they would collapse. I didn’t want to buy chairs when I knew, if I pushed myself, I could just make some.’
Although practicality is sometimes necessary, it is the tangible experience which informs Elias’ designs with a desire to ‘provoke a feeling of wanting to touch the material and figure out what it is’.
One to Watch: Seungjin Yang's playful and provocative balloon furniture
This is exactly what her ‘Pofi’ chairs deliver. The squashy, collapsible chair offers multiple possibilities with ‘no right way to use it’. Reflecting on the design process she said: ‘ I really wanted to have an interactive approach to them. You fall when you sit, and when you stand, it stands back up with you. The function of them is to have “no function,” and these are my favourite pieces of them all.’
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