Sophie Goodchild: Night Feed 16 Oct - 8 Nov

Nottingham-based artist Sophie Goodchild’s Night Feed brings together a new body of felted works developed during her residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall.

Working from Studio 5 with the Atlantic directly behind her, Goodchild developed the works through sustained encounters with the coastline — walking, swimming and observing the changing landscape. The works were made during the pregnancy of her second child, bringing an intimate experience of bodily change into an established practice concerned with material transformation, containment, layering and geological time.

At high tide, the studio became almost womb-like, filled with the sound and movement of the sea. The physical environment became a framework through which Goodchild considered the relationship between body and landscape. The panoramic scale of the new works reflects the studio’s architecture, while the layered strata and fissures of the granite landscape provided a vocabulary for the construction of the felt panels.

Goodchild works with wool, water, soap, pressure and repetition, transforming loose fibres into dense, coherent surfaces. Water is both an agent of transformation and something that must be controlled. Rather than applying an image to a surface, Goodchild gradually produces the surface itself through fibre, moisture, pressure and movement.

Her research at Porthmeor extended into the geology of West Penwith, where rock formations, fissures and layered strata became part of the visual language of the work. Linear markings move between geological divisions and the changing surface of the body, while recurring forms — eggs, vessels, shells, caverns and openings — suggest structures capable of holding something unseen: life, energy and the potential for transformation.

The repetitive work of fishermen preparing their nets below the studios provided an unexpected parallel to Goodchild’s own process. The slow preparation of the nets before casting echoed the gradual layering and manipulation of wool before it is transformed through water and pressure.

In Night Feed, these cycles continue through the rhythms of tide, pregnancy, labour, feeding and making. The works occupy an unstable space between painting and textile, image and object, abstraction and embodied experience. They are neither representations of the landscape nor illustrations of the body, but emerge through a process in which the two continually overlap.

Sophie Goodchild’s work has been exhibited across the UK, including at Flowers Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Standpoint Gallery and Sid Motion Gallery. She has held solo exhibitions at Flatland Projects, Bexhill and Trafalgar Avenue, London, and undertaken residencies and placements including AA2A at Loughborough University, Troy Town Art Pottery Residency and a Graduate Studio Award at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Art from Kingston School of Art.