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Flatland Projects is extremely excited to present 'Significant Other: Bulging Water' by UK born artist Sophie Goodchild opening Saturday 9th April 2022. This exhibition marks the first in our new Bexhill-on-Sea space at Beeching Road Studios. Those who have followed our journey will know that this has been a long term project and we are incredibly honoured to mark this occasion with Sophie's first UK solo presentation. 

 

 

‘Significant Other: Bulging Water’ is an exhibition of felted, ceramic, stone, and salt sculptures produced throughout her experience and time of pregnancy. Goodchild’s approach to making is both connected to craft and the land through the elemental qualities in the making process. Materially, felt and ceramics derive from the fundamental need to contain, carry and protect, commonly descending from living organisms and their own surrounding ecosystems. A desire to locate a resemblance, a familiar spirit and kinship with the environment. A primitive, nesting, animalistic instinct; both estranged and entangled through a layering process. Through connecting histories of craft, Goodchild places focus upon touch through her making as ‘sensation as translation’; an idea rooted in the haptic; to feel within new realms and more importantly, to look at touch as potency.

 

“There is a sense of horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a physical thing with porous boundaries. Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body. Therefore each body is involved with every other living thing on earth…I thought that I might be able to capture the second body, trapping it inside a real body, by looking at it as a part of animal life. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated with a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away. To be a living thing is to exist in two bodies.” - The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard.

 

Sophie Goodchild (b.1993, Chester, UK) lives and works in Nottingham, and has most recently been included in group presentations at Kupfer Project, London; One Thoresby Street, Nottingham; and Saatchi Gallery, London. Goodchild is currently the recipient of the Backlit Gallery studio award in Nottingham, was a recipient of the 2021 London Bronze Editions Prize and a finalist in the 2020 Ingram Prize.

 

Flatland Projects has been supporting and developing artist’s first major bodies of work since 2018, and we are delighted to 

continue our work in Bexhill towards the vision of the developing artistic ecology in the industrial landscape of Beeching Road.