About Sophie

I am an Irish artist based in Wicklow. I hold an MA 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). My practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and sound, and is grounded in material research and
spatial sensitivity.

Since my debut solo exhibition, Concretus: Ulterior Objects (Tactic / Sample-Studios, Cork, 2017), I have exhibited widely across Ireland, including at Rua Red, the Royal Hibernian Academy, The Complex, Gormleys Fine Art, Solstice Arts Centre, and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. Internationally, my work has been presented in Berlin, London, Kyoto, Utrecht, Reykjavik, Mexico City, New York, and Paris, including recently at the independent fair 7 Rue Froissart, curated by Eamonn Maxwell.

Residencies are central to my practice, supporting the development of work that is responsive to specific landscapes. Recent residencies include the Kagan Hotel
(Kyoto), El Sur (Mexico City), Sounds from a Safe Harbour (Cork), Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Lay of the Land (Mizen Head), and the National Sculpture Factory.

From 2017 to 2019, I worked in Brooklyn with artist Michael Joo, further developing my sculptural practice. I also lecture in Fine Art and Architecture, including at Cork Centre for Architectural Education, University of Limerick, and Limerick School of Art and Design.

My work is held in public and private collections, including Ireland House, the new Irish Embassy in Tokyo. In 2020, I was commissioned to produce Brí, an 8-metre- tall permanent public sculpture in Dublin. Earlier experience includes internships with Ireland’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015) and EVA International Limerick (2016). A residency in Mexico in 2024 marked a return to metal as a sculptural medium, prompting a renewed engagement with questions of identity, memory, and belonging.

My current research explores the cultural and material histories of vegetation, place, memory, and architecture. Recent work developed in Japan, Mexico, and West Cork forms part of an ongoing project, A Consequence of Relation, which brings together sites of personal and material resonance, including Glengarriff West Cork, Kyoto, and Mexico City.

This research informed new works featured in a recent show Persistence of Trace (March 2026), where I presented the wall-based sculptural work Shadow Structure, 2026. 

s.nicola.gough@gmail.com
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A woman with long, wavy hair, wearing a black blazer and jewelry, standing with arms crossed in front of a white wall with charts or papers, in a bright, minimalistic room.

My practice examines identity as a relational and continuously evolving process shaped through material encounter, memory, and place. Working across drawing, sculpture, sound, and installation, I engage materials—cast silver, bamboo, magnolia forms, tiles, bone, graphite—not as neutral substances but as agents carrying ecological, cultural, and colonial histories. These materials become sites where memory is registered, disrupted, or reconstituted, allowing form to emerge through processes of drift, recurrence, and transformation.

Residencies and site-responsive research in Mexico, Japan, and Ireland have become central methodologies within my work. These contexts enable an expanded material vocabulary and sharpen my focus on cyclical structures, somatic mapping, and the mnemonic capacities of landscape. While my work often begins with systems of order—grids, tiled planes, architectural fragments—it ultimately resists fixity, shifting toward soft rupture, misalignment, or fragmentation. In this, I consider memory not as narrative content but as spatial and sensory condition.

These concerns are synthesised in my ongoing project, A Consequence of Relation, now in its final Irish phase. This strand investigates how memory enters form through the materiality of landscape and the epistemologies embedded in the Irish language. I am developing the concept of a mnemonic metabolism to describe how local forms—native and invasive species, vernacular architectures, geological traces such as silver—embody histories of adaptation, loss, and persistence.

This phase also explores how Gaeilge articulates an embodied relationship to place through toponymy, metaphor, and oral tradition. Through sculptural studies, sound works, and field-based research, I aim to unearth forms that function as thresholds: sites where origin and adaptation, past and present, material and memory converge.

My two-dimensional works examine the dissolution of figure and ground through materially driven processes that allow the surface to behave as a porous and unstable field. Working with earth pigments, staining and layered mark-making, I explore how environment acts not as backdrop but as an active force that alters bodies, materials and perception over time. The surfaces accumulate like sedimentary or ecological formations, holding traces of erosion, growth, memory and encounter within their material structure.