Sculpture (MA)
Sophie Kemp
b. 1986, UK
Exhibitions
2020 TOUCH ME; curated by Veronika Neukirch; (digital, forthcoming)
2020 SupaStore Academy; curated by Sarah Staton and Egija Inzule; 17 July - 30 September, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania (forthcoming)
2019 Friend, My Distance is Futurity-Like; collaborative show with Anna Mészáros; 29 November - 01 December, London
2019 Priority Rule; collaborative show as part of MERZIETY; 28 November - 04 December, RCA, London
2019 Dirty Hands and Revelations; residency group show; Standpoint, London
2019 Brexhibition; curated by Wilko Austermann; collaborative work with Dolly Kershaw; RCA, London
2018 Four; collaborative work with Sara Juel Andersen; 25 July, Stour Space, London
2018 Three; performance with Julia Zalcberg Angulo; 25-27 June, hARTslane, London
2018 Two; collaborative work with Marion Flanagan, Mariana Heilmann, Fiona McCurdie, Andréa Ribeiro da Rocha; 27 May, London
2018 One; collaborative work with Georgina Kapralou; 25-27 April, Chelsea College of Arts, London
5in5 Collaborative Project; Curated by Aslıhan Pehlivanlı, Sara Juel Andersen and Shazia Salam
2018 Graduate Diploma End of Year Show; 15-23 June , Chelsea College of Arts, London
2018 Offsite; 08 -11 May, Safehouse 1&2, London
2018 Snorkel; 12 -16 February, Cookhouse, Chelsea College of Arts, London
Teaching
2018-Present, UAL Chelsea College of Arts, Graduate Diploma Fine Art, Visiting Speaker
2017-Present, The Working Men’s College, London, UAL Art Foundation Fine Art Pathway, Visiting Tutor
2020 UCA Farnham, BA Fine Art, Visiting Tutor
Education
2018-2020 MA Sculpture Royal College of Art
2017-2018 Graduate Diploma Fine Art UAL Chelsea College of Arts
2016-2017 PGCE Post Compulsory Education UCL Institute of Education
My practice works with the encoded aesthetics located in lost detritus and vernacular, celebratory objects. I draw on the architectural motif of the ‘folly’ as I perceive it to sit at the intersection of human encounter and imagination, and use it to create works which are encountered at a scale almost akin to architectural intervention. Here ‘folly’ is pivoted from its more typical exclusivity into objects rendered more playful and open via their portable, malleable and shonky characteristics. The vivacity and exuberance of my encounters with vibrant, unruly detritus informs my material language of construction and process, prompting the use of handmade, temporary, speculative and model materials such as papier-mâché, cardboard and pewter. Exhibiting my works physically exposes them to the possibility of performative interaction with the viewer. The invitation for viewers to activate the work at the site of exhibition, and collaborative work with artists including long-term collaborator Dolly Kershaw, is a crucial process drawing risk and the undirected encounter into the work. Drawing on sociologies of fun and taste, my goal is to use elements of risk, play and collectivity to stage the site of the work as resistive, disruptive and explorative via humour and the absurd.
Please check back to this page for future streams.
Past live streams will be archived to the respective Twitch channels.
Please click the Twitch handles ‘sophiegracekemp’ and ‘dollykershaw’ to navigate to these.
Please see the Situationist RCA section below for information about events in relation to this work.
This is the most recent of several collaborations between myself and Dolly Kershaw. We make companion pieces at a distance and reveal them to one another on completion, and then discuss documentation. In this work our sculptures are physically animated and live streamed intermittently, potentially coinciding with each other, or not. These reference our interests in objects and aesthetics that engage in systems of public control and distancing and the shonky material language of the model or replica is used to satirise and interrogate these forms. Intermittent live streaming, the chance that these works may coincide but may not, foregrounds the importance of the encounter and the moment of connection. The language of signs and signals is finding new, vital, importance in this historic, multifaceted global crisis, re-asserting itself and its authority in a context of civil discontent. The live event shown in a browser screen highlights the function of the digital as a sublime communication form which changes how we consume connectedness, both supplying connectivity between disparate parties while insisting on their physical separation. The usual usage of the live-stream as a medium is subverted by the Signals being both spectacular and anti-climactic, referencing the unpredictable, unruly and unannounced nature of sirens and buoys.
Medium:
Two simultaneous digital live streamsSize:
durations variableIn Collaboration with:
carrier bag (encounter)
carrier bag (front)
carrier bag (interior)
Medium:
paint, papier-mâché, chicken wire, mild steel, diamond plate, castorsSize:
350 x 200 x 70 cm approx
paper streamers (front view)
paper streamers (detail)
paper streamers (side view)
paper streamers (detail)
Medium:
digital print, adhesive vinyl, cardboard postal tubesSize:
dimensions variable, individual tubes 163.2 cm x ø 21 cm approxMedium:
two channel digital filmSize:
2 mins 03 secs
() (front view)
() (back view)
() (detail)
Medium:
paint, french chalk, papier-mâché, polystyrene, tape, steel, castorsSize:
240 x 120 x 60cm approx
plinth works (variation 01)
plinth works (variation 02)
plinth works (detail)
plinth works (detail)
Medium:
paint, jesmonite, papier-mâché, cast pewter, digital design, adhesive vinyl, cardboard postal tubesSize:
large scale jesmonite lemons 40cm x 30cm x 25cm approx lemon and banana pewter casts 09cm x 07cm x 1.1kg and 15cm x 05cm x 0.5kg approx individual cardboard tubes 136cm x ø 10cm approx
Party Rings
Pip
Both this work and ‘Barriers’ were made as collaborations with Dolly Kershaw at transnational distance whilst she was on exchange at The University of Texas, Austin and I at RCA, London. Our responses are monuments to the child-like word/object associations that might normally only take place beneath a work, becoming a necessarily visible bridge in the site of collaboration between two individual practices. Both are inspired by the act of forming a community through collective efforts and sharing of resources to challenge structures. The work began when Dolly told me about a street protest she had seen just outside La Paz, Bolivia in 2015. Indigenous communities had blocked the roads with cement pipes, and she referred to them as ‘hula hoops’, as in the crisps. This association of how food operates as a communal experience opened up a conversation about the aesthetic language of protest, specifically the use of circular or cyclical forms as something which could be played with or animated.
We embraced and enforced the restriction of being unable to see what the other was making, and the work developed into duo-sculptures. Our interest in play as a site of subterfuge and resistance enabled large scale replicas of party rings to be made as appropriate companion pieces to a cement pipe replica. We both chose to activate and film our sculptures within our respective institutions; the party rings were released into a public stairway used by students and staff in the RCA Kensington building, and the cement pipe was rolled out of the site at which it had been built in the Department of Art at UT, caught on mock-CCTV, where it eventually collapsed under its own weight. In doing so, we aimed to reference and critique the structural favouring of rigid utility over play in art institutions, and re-assert the role of community within these spaces.
Medium:
Sculptures: Party Rings: paint, papier-mâché, polystyrene Pip: cement, cardboard, hessian, newspaper, glue, Digital filmsSize:
Sculptures: Party rings: dimensions variable, each ring 60cm x 5cm approx Pip: 130 x 100cm approx. Digital films: 22 secs, 1min 31 secs
Archway (side view)
Archway (front view)
As with ‘Loopholes’, this work was made in collaboration with Dolly Kershaw at transnational distance whilst she was on exchange at The University of Texas, Austin and I at RCA, London. We worked from one shared image of a concrete road block photographed in London with minimal discussion about formal development of the two components of the work. Having established overlapping interests in methods of public intervention and the absurd, we both coincidentally chose to elevate our barriers from the ground with semi-functional legs that rendered the sculptures precarious. This anthropomorphised objects of infrastructure into comic, bodily and spatial interventions. In both works absurdity is heavily mined as we invert the functionality of a heavy, preventative, sedentary object into forms which give it levity, humour and thwarted ambitions.
Dolly’s barrier resembled the original photograph of our starting point. She purposefully created it to be structurally unsound, stapling repurposed timber together which was balanced on sewage pipes. This was then papier-mâché’d and coated in cement. As with my barrier, the legs added to the work’s bodily personality. This contributed to the titling of the work as ‘Barry’, who could not withstand the wind and its own imbalance, and collapsed loudly in the road with slapstick effect. Despite this, cars still respected the barrier’s authority, veering around it as they departed the UT campus.
My barrier was elevated above a walkway in the Sculpture studios at RCA, creating a theatrical promenade that made visible the architecture of the space and referencing historical and contemporary dialogues about the studio as a site of art creation with complex and contested purposes. Constructed from fabric inner tubes, gyproc and a silver thermal vapour barrier, languages of support, protection and obfuscation were used to humorously underline its now inverted function as a point of spectacle and convocation.
Our interests in the contested spaces of art-making are put into parallel with concerns relating to working in the public sphere. Our positioning of playful works which engage the structures of institutions (architecture and space) is used to explore their rigidity and capacities for fostering open, porous boundaries, as we feel the ethics of responsibility and accessibility necessarily come into play in this context.
