Lot 2: Sophie Gough - Untitled, 2020-2021

Sophie Gough lives and works in Cork city. She makes sculptural work that is influenced by her interest in material culture and the physical exploration of space. By researching urban and rural environments, she examines forms and materials found within the interstices of built and natural landscapes through the making of drawings, installations and objects. Her practice engages with the production of paradoxical entities oscillating between suggestions of the architectural and the geologic.

This is a new series of works by Sophie using hand-made paper fragments, collected plant fibres and recycled paper from project proposal archives and imaginings that have not yet become. This project stems from a personal and intuitive engagement over the last year reflecting on culture, nature and time.

"Paper making is a process I first began exploring whilst on a residency in Glengarriff during the country’s first national lockdown. During that uncertain time, it became a meditative activity alongside daily walks through which I could establish moments of calm and a sense of control. West cork boasts of one of the most bio-diverse regions in Ireland and it was here where the majority of the plant fibres used in these works grew and were collected. Anchored in the intimacy of the everyday, the quintessential industrial material, these paper collages emit natural tones from plants that visually characterise the quality of the land from which they came.

Driven by my interest in Japanese philosophies and fibre making traditions, these works explore and manipulate the tactile paper making process with my attention focused on it’s strong materiality, subtly exaggerating the tears, folds, colour bleeds, breakages and variety of pulps. To me, these collages are a form of painting with paper that allows me to slowly bridge a gap between craft traditions and those of fine art. Playful and experimental at its core the process is a constant reconfiguration of aesthetic compositions with line, colour, texture, surface, visual weight and form becoming an exciting task prior to securing the fragments in a new disposition.

Paper is a technology that despite sustainability efforts continues to exist. It lingers still in our everyday as necessity, just like our deep desire to remain connected with nature. Fundamentally, these works do not intend to prioritise culture over nature but rather subtly seek a mediation on all the fibres that surround us, asking the viewer to look slowly, closely and to integrate a greater consciousness back into our material cultural practices and it’s expanded landscape.