After returning from the fall 1934 stay in Yaddo, Slobodkina found work at a polychrome textile factory in Clifton (the job was originally offered to Ilya). She lived with her family in Clifton in an apartment that embodied “lower-middle class mentality” and would go home to the city and Bolotowsky on weekends. It was in this Clifton apartment that Slobodkina produced The Sink. “The only good thing I can credit to the stay in that little apartment, is the first cubist-inspired painting I produced there. I had been silently gathering information about Cubist theories, and left alone one weekend (dreadful snowstorm, I think), promptly produced a fractured image of the sink in the little Clifton bathroom. It was quite a breakthrough for me, on my own. Ilya never took to Cubism in its pure form”