The Sand In The Pearl

The exhibition centres on a new body of work by Nottingham-based artist Sophie Goodchild informed by the healing and nurturing properties of wool. The exhibition is an extension of Sophie’s research into ‘Wool as a Cloak for Survival: The Alchemy of Form and Fabric’ and explores from an interpretive symbolic perspective how the spiral, a motif found in landscape, architecture, and throughout the natural world, emulates cyclical movements and helical structures and its relation to chaos and (dis)order within the mundane. 

A series of felted tapestries guide the viewer through the gallery, each an imagined landscape drawing from the artist’s experience of early motherhood encapsulating memories and moments of care, nourishment and comfort. The works’ layered surfaces reference natural phenomena, biological processes and geological time; storms and whirlpools, breastfeeding and osmosis, fossilisation and stratification. Serving as a portal to the bridge or (non)space between a contemporary diaristic revelation of early motherhood and the mother archetype, the exhibition challenges ideas ingrained in the collective unconscious and repositions this state of being, this new environment, within something more tangible and tactile.

The tapestries are made through episodic and responsive modes of production with each stage of layering, ground making, and machining informed by that which proceeded it. In the studio, Sophie responds to these haptic conditions of making, compelled by the unpredictable grapple of collaging felt appendages until the work reveals itself. The material limitations of wet felting and mechanical constraints of the process dictate the visual. The tapestries therefore evolve autonomously, yet exist as spoken truths relating directly to her research, reflecting multiple layers of thought.

The Sand In The Pearl is accompanied by an interview by artist Lana Locke and supported by Oppenheim John-Downes Memorial Trust and The Eaton Fund.