Sophie Goodchild

Sophie’s practice infuses the fragility of existence within the non-place, non-linear space between human and non-human. An enquiry into the otherworldly through the leading foot of the intuitive strange, linking the rural, the environmental, the mythological, the political, the folkloric and the historical. Combining traditionally hand-crafted techniques such as felting, ceramics and weaving, she explores and responds to a new ecological vision in opposition to the capital. A space to imagine an alternative history and an ineffable future.

The physicality of the body in the making of structures take centre stage: craft, repetition, trust, territory and rhythm. There is a pollination of information that infects and spans from work to work, in the fusing and preserving act of making.

Her making is embedded in the roots of materiality; saturation and sensation as translation. Embellishing layers as screens as cracks, through texture and density, the making is tidal in structure, embodying natural peaks and valleys in both the stitch and pixels combined. An entangled order.

Material as universal. Making as ambition. Making as challenge- always.

The other aspect of craft work is concerned with artwork, the realization of a hope for a lawful and enduring nature. Other elements, such as proportion, space relations, rhythm, predominate in these experiments, as they do in the other arts. No limitations other than the velo of the material itself are set. More than an active process, it is a listening for the dictation of the material and a taking in of the laws of harmony. It is for this reason that we can find certitude in the belief that we are taking part in an eternal order – Black Mountain College Bulletin 5. 1938. Reprinted in College Art Journal III:2. Janurary 1944, pg. 51-54 and in Anni Albers: On Designing. 1959 and 1971.