Sophie Southgate

Sophie Southgate is an artist living and working in Kent and Bristol. 

She graduated from Cardiff School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Ceramics in 2014. She was the first recipient of the Regina Lasker Prize upon graduating and won a year-long graduate residency at Fireworks Clay Studios. She exhibited at the 2015 National Eisteddfod, winning the Y Lle Celf Art CASW Purchase Prize. She was part of the Crafts Council Hothouse programme, a winner of Future Lights Ceramics and its Dimensions and has exhibited her ceramics internationally. 

Sophie received a QEST Scholarship, alongside a Griffin Scholarship, to study for an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2019. During her first year of study, Sophie transitioned from a purely ceramics practice to working with cast glass, developing a new material-led methodology to explore colour and form. 

She was awarded a Corning Museum of Glass Partner Scholarship and will be attending a two-week course in Corning, New York with Jessica Loughlin in July 2023.

Sophie’s work explores colour and form, and how one interacts with the other. Inspired by geometry, architecture, liminal spaces and places of transition, she translates two-dimensional shapes into complex three-dimensional forms. 

Transitioning from ceramics to cast glass in 2019 was a natural development in Sophie’s practice.  Following the same paths of form creation through plaster-based processes, as well as introducing new methods of production like CNC, Sophie found an affinity with this new material discipline. 

Sophie’s glass practice has opened new doors into working with colour and this has become the primary focus of this series of sculptures, enhanced but not restricted by form. 

Colour is no longer applied to surface, it is not decorative or secondary to form, nor is it contained. 

Colours shift and change, travelling through form, dancing around curves and across planes before disappearing, fluctuating with light, movement and perspective. 

Colour is definitive, unstable and transient; it is solid yet insubstantial.