This exhibition depicts works in which in which the artist responds to her experiences whilst an artist in residence in Kyoto City. The works are shaped through slow processes of walking, observing, assembling, and reassembling. Across drawings, sculptural fragments, and spatial installations, there is a recurring concern with how memory enters form—not as narrative, but as residue, rhythm, and quiet return.

Informed by the Japanese concept of mono no aware—a sensitivity to the transience of things—the works here engage with impermanence  not as loss, but as a condition for attention. This is not a longing for preservation, but a practice of recognising that beauty, like identity, is made visible through its instability.

Many of the works emerge from small acts of collection: bamboo culm sheaths gathered at the city’s edges, soft rubbings taken from tatami mats, sketchbook impressions formed while walking through shifting spaces. What remains is not movement itself, but what drifts after it—the press of touch, the erosion of surface, the echo of presence. The tile works evoke architecture’s grid and order, but fracture into provisional assemblies. Cast bamboo fragments rest like fossils in Held by Celadon Drifts, embedded across a celadon surface that catches and lets go of light.

Nearby, Something in Waiting layers luminous bamboo sheaths into a wall that holds both breath and breakage—a skin that shimmers yet recedes. These are works that wait without resolution, surfaces that remember by soft reconstitution. In Somatic Ley Lines, graphite rubbings map not topography but embodiment—tatami-scaled grids rendered through touch and repetition. Elsewhere, An Accumulation of Return assembles torn sketchbook pages into a drifting field, where memory sediments across layers of encounter, trace, and return. In each, memory is not fixed, but fugitive. Identity, likewise, is not defined by coherence, but shaped through disassembly, reassembly, and the subtle tension between what is held and what dissolves.

Throughout Bordering Stillness, materials behave like thresholds—gathering what has passed through, yet never fully closing. Stillness is not absence, but a field of tension, attention, and ongoing transformation. What endures is not the form itself, but the feeling it leaves behind. In this space, identity and memory unfold as porous, provisional structures—fragile, persistent, and quietly pulsating.

Sophie Gough

ソフィー・ガフは、アイルランドの西コーク沿岸地域を拠点とするアーティストです。2022年、ロンドンのロイヤル・カレッジ・オブ・アートにて学際的研究の修士号を取得し、2016年にはリムリック美術大学にて彫刻の学士号（最優等）を取得しました。彼女の実践は、ドローイング、彫刻、絵画、サウンドにまたがり、素材研究と空間的感受性に深く根ざしています。

彼女の初個展「Concretus: Ulterior Objects」は2017年、コークのTactic / Sample Studiosギャラリーにて開催されました。その後、アイルランド国内ではRua Red、Gormleys Fine Art、Fráma Gallery、ロイヤル・ハイバーニアン・アカデミー、The Complex、Hang Tough Gallery、Art Riddler 2024（ダブリン）、Lord Mayor’s Pavilion（コーク）、Solstice Arts Centre（ミース）などで作品を発表しています。国際的には、ベルリン、ロンドン、ユトレヒト、レイキャビク、メキシコシティ、ニューヨークなどでも展示されています。

滞在制作歴としては、京都のカガンホテル、メキシコシティのEl Sur、CorkのSounds from a Safe Harbour Festival、Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre、National Sculpture Factoryなどがあります。2017年から2019年にかけて、ブルックリンにて著名な彫刻家マイケル・ジュウのもとで研鑽を積み、2020年にはダブリンにてパブリック・スカルプチャー「Brí」の制作を委託されました。また、2015年にはヴェネツィア・ビエンナーレのアイルランド館、2016年にはEVA Internationalにてインターンとしても参加しています。

2024年のメキシコでの滞在制作を通じ、過去の海外経験で一時的に失われていた自身の実践の重要な要素が再び顕在化しました。この経験は、アイデンティティ、記憶、帰属意識への新たな探求へとつながり、より身体的かつ風景に根ざしたアプローチへの転換を促しました。現在は植物や建築の文化的・物質的歴史を調査する中で、日本での制作と展示を含む重要なフェーズに入っています。この国際的な活動は、2025年にアイルランド・西コークでの新作展によって結実する予定です。

ソフィー・ガフの作品は、物質の記憶と風景の感覚的言語を通じて、アイデンティティの不安定さを探求しています。彼女の実践はドローイング、彫刻、絵画、サウンドといった多様な媒体を用いて展開され、人と場所を形作る時間的・政治的・個人的な層への問いかけとして機能しています。風景は背景としてではなく、「記憶装置」として扱われ、自然的・感情的・文化的要素から成る生きた記録として捉えられています。

現在の研究の中心には「植生」、特に竹があり、それは複雑に絡み合った歴史の現場として位置づけられます。彼女は、植民地主義や資源搾取のエコロジカルな余波に注目し、日本、アイルランド、メキシコにおける植物移植の軌跡を辿ります。帝国的な竹林から侵略的な外来種に至るまで、植物の中に静かで持続的な抵抗の姿を見出しています。竹は、搾取のシステムに組み込まれながらも、回復力に富み、再生的で、地域の知識や記憶に深く根ざした象徴であり、同時に実体でもあります。

彼女のアプローチは、知的理解よりもむしろ身体的な認識と空間的関与を重視しています。光は重要な素材として頻繁に登場し、収集したオブジェクトに内在する潜在的エネルギーを可視化し、見過ごされていたものを現在へと呼び戻します。彼女の彫刻、ドローイング、インスタレーションは、崩壊と再構築を創造的条件として受け入れ、継続的で不安定な「生成の過程」を表現しています。

ガフの作品における時間は直線的ではなく、むしろ伸縮的です。過去と現在が物質の漂流や概念的な層を通じて交錯し、彼女の関心は起源にではなく「変容」にあります。形態やアイデンティティが周囲の影響によって常に再編成されていく様を追うことで、彼女は不確かさ、親密さ、そして痕跡を保持する進化し続ける実践を構築しています。

Artist Biography

Sophie Gough is an Irish artist based on the rural coast of West Cork. She holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Research from the Royal College of Art, London (2022), and a First-Class Honours BA in Sculpture from Limerick School of Art and Design (2016). Her practice spans drawing, sculpture, painting, and sound, and is rooted in material research and spatial sensitivity.

Gough’s debut solo exhibition, Concretus: Ulterior Objects, was held at Tactic / Sample-Studios Gallery, Cork in 2017. Since then, she has exhibited nationally at venues such as Rua Red, Gormleys Fine Art, Fráma Gallery, the Royal Hibernian Academy, The Complex, Hang Tough Gallery, The Art Riddler 2024 (Dublin), Sample-Studios at the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion (Cork), and Solstice Arts Centre (Meath). Internationally, her work has been shown in Berlin, London, Utrecht, Reykjavik, Mexico City, and New York.

She has undertaken residencies with the Kagan Hotel (Kyoto),  El Sur (Mexico City), Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival (Cork), Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, and The National Sculpture Factory. From 2017 to 2019, she deepened her sculptural knowledge while working in Brooklyn with renowned artist Michael Joo. In 2020, she was commissioned to produce Brí, a permanent public sculpture in Dublin. Earlier engagements include internships with Ireland’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015) and EVA International (2016).

A recent residency in Mexico (2024) reawakened aspects of Gough’s practice that had become dormant during earlier periods abroad. This pivotal experience led to a renewed exploration of identity, memory, and belonging—catalysing a shift toward more embodied, landscape-rooted work. With ongoing research into the cultural and material histories of vegetation and architecture, her current trajectory includes a significant period of work and exhibition in Japan. This international phase will culminate in the development of new work to be presented in West Cork in 2025/ 2016.

Artist Statement (Third Person):

Sophie Gough’s practice explores the instability of identity through material memory and the sensorial language of landscapes. Her work unfolds across drawing, sculpture, painting, and sound, each medium forming part of an inquiry into the layers—temporal, political, personal—that shape both people and places. She treats landscape not as backdrop, but as mnemonic device: a living record composed of natural, emotional, and cultural materials.

Central to her current investigations is vegetation—particularly bamboo—as a site of entangled histories. Gough draws attention to the ecological afterlives of colonisation and extraction, tracing the transplantation of flora across Japan, Ireland, and Mexico. From imperial groves to invasive species, she locates in plants a quiet but enduring resistance. For her, bamboo is both symbol and substance: implicated in exploitative systems, yet also resilient, regenerative, and deeply embedded in local knowledge and memory.

She works through embodied forms of knowing, privileging presence and spatial engagement over intellectual distance. Light often features as a material in her process, revealing latent energies within gathered objects and casting the overlooked into renewed focus. Her sculptures, drawings, and installations embrace collapse and reconstruction as creative conditions, enacting a continuous, precarious becoming.

Time in Gough’s work is not linear but elastic; past and present bleed together through material drift and conceptual layering. Her interest lies not in origin, but in transformation—the way forms, like identities, are always being reconstituted by their surroundings. In this way, she builds a deeply situated, evolving practice that holds space for uncertainty, intimacy, and the traces that endure.