Zsófia Szász

Since 2020, Zsófia Szász has been focusing specifically on visual and applied arts inspired by Hungarian folk art. With her art, she aims to position herself at the intersection of folk art, visual art, and applied art, as the technique of embroidery easily facilitates this. She explicitly does not aim to engage in heritage preservation or the integration of folk art into urban environments, but rather seeks a form of temporal modernization through changes in context and form. Since 2021, she has been collaborating with BarabasiLab, a research group based in Boston led by Albert-László Barabási. In 2022, Szász Zsófia presented her first solo data-based needlework at 360 Design Budapest.

About the object

In her experiment, Zsófia Szász demonstrate that a traditional motif extracted from Hungarian folklore, when fragmented and placed on a different medium, still evokes the nostalgic, pleasantly familiar feeling that the audience may miss in their daily lives. At the same time, the “pixelated” pattern construction can be interpreted by the eye, tired from the digital world, as a restorative element.