Description
Sophie Southgate is an artist living and working between Bristol and Kent. Her glasswork explores colour and form and how one interacts with the other. Inspired by geometry, architecture, and places of transition, she translates two-dimensional shapes into complex forms.
Sophie’s approach to making is to find a playfulness in the infinite colour combinations and iterations of form. Working with blocks of cast glass that are joined to become segments, these segments are like pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle. They are joined together to become larger forms that grow slowly outwards from a singular point, rotating and coiling. Never pre-planned, each piece develops through intuition and play.
Sophie’s work with glass has opened new doors into working with colour. Colour is no longer restricted to surface, it is no longer secondary to form, nor is it contained. Colours shift and change, travelling through form and along surfaces, fluctuating with light, movement and perspective. The work requires participation, the viewer must look and see and move to experience it.
Sophie graduated from Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2014 with a BA in Ceramics, working as a ceramic artist and exhibiting around the UK and Europe. In 2019 she attended the Royal College of Art and begun working with cast glass, graduating with a Masters in 2023. During this time, she was awarded a QEST Britford Bridge Trust Scholarship and funding from the RCA, as well as a Scholarship to attend a course at Corning Museum of Glass. She is winner of the 2023 Bullseye Glass Prize.
