Sophie Wilson doesn’t do perfect. When we first spoke to the artist and founder of 1690 Store about making a film about life in Crowland Manor, the tumbledown house she and three of her children have called home 2014, she warned us that we would have to “take us as you find us”. “We live alongside history here,” she continued, “rather than moving away from it.”
As well as paying heed to the lives she feels have gone before here by allowing the jumbled joy of life to play out against this positively un-perfect building, Sophie’s work plays into this too. Sophie’s handsome sgraffito-slipware ceramics – terracotta salt boxes, butter dishes and chargers, all made by hand in a requisitioned scullery beside the kitchen – are poetic expressions of the tug of history she feels here, often inscribed with literary bon mots and bygone rhymes.
When it comes to her children, “I think they’re beginning to understand the value of this building’s authenticity,” she says. Sophie herself needs no convincing. however. “I think because it’s so wonky and flawed, it’s a human place. It’s very close to being human… And so it’s easy to love.” In fact, everything Sophie says comes back to love. “I’ve always thought this house is the love of my life.” So what about the future, then, when life inevitably shifts and priorities change? Sophie is unsurprisingly sanguine. “I would leave this house for love, but nothing else.”
Film: James Coyle Stills photography: Elliot Sheppard Interview: Grace McCloud Production: Hannah Phillips and Harry Cave Graphic design: Tom Young
I remember coming here for the first time and having a real sense of all the lives that had
lived here, the noise the walls had kind of absorbed. When I came here for the first time
I really wanted to be part of that noise, you know, I really wanted for the house to soak us up.
I think most people would kind of see the water running down the walls and the marks that that's
made. You know, I've spent many decades trying to make them myself and here they just occur
naturally. You know, I like that for the children too although I don't think they, I think they're
beginning to understand the value of this building's authenticity. Quite often you'll brush
past a wall and you'll be wearing a lot of it as you kind of move on. The building's personality
and how the building is communicating in terms of the atmosphere, it's quite a personal thing,
it's a difficult thing to convey because it's just feeling that I have.
I'm much more interested and curious about living in places that
are kind of offering history and narrative and story and texture. I did my degree in tapestry
at Edinburgh so I've always been interested in surfaces and surface decoration and surface
texture and I worked as a tutor at a foundation course in the textile department and that was
very much about creating surfaces from scratch as an artist or designer. There are just layers
and layers and layers of surface because it's a building that dates back to 1551. Those surfaces
have been preserved and they have not been interfered with. The most important thing
is that I feel looked after in this house, you know, I feel like we're in a safe place.
When I first moved here the garden was a wood, it was completely overgrown and it had self-seeded
buddleia and elder and brambles up to your shoulder and so many nettle. But I cleared a
bit myself and in doing so I dug up so many lovely old shards of ceramics, chronology of
ceramic technique and that really informed the kind of work and the projects that I've done
since. That's really why I build in terracotta so it has had a really significant effect on
the work that I produce and what I've been curious to understand more about. My ambition
is to whatever I produce from here kind of goes out with that same degree of provenance. You know,
whatever I make I see it in this building first. I only make stuff that I would use.
I have an incredibly personal connection with this house and I love all the lives that have
gone before me actually in this house. You know, I have a real sense of those relationships and
those characters. I think because it's all wonky and flawed and it's a human place,
it's very close to being human. It's very authentic in that way and so and it's easy
to love. It's easy to fall in love with this house and be loved by this house actually.
The chap who we bought it from, the door was opened and I was holding the door and he walked
over the threshold to go into the garden. I was in the house and he had just stepped out
and it was mine. And we both knew it and he said,
did you feel that? And I said, I did. It was really extraordinary. I can't imagine leaving
here. I've always thought that I would be a little old lady in pearls and a twin set
kind of rattling around this house. I don't think I'll ever be able to have the money to restore it
fully. If I can get a new roof on it, I'd be thrilled. If I were to ever consider selling
this house, it would just be, it would be for love. I've always thought this house
is the love of my life. I would leave this house for love, but nothing else.
