Dialogues by Sopie Standford (UK) is one of the three sets of work that are selected from DIVFUSE Film Archive Open Call No.1 with a theme on domesticity.
Film Screenings:
Session One 6 June 2025 Friday 7pm (+ artist’s talk)
Session Two 7 June Saturday 3pm
Session Three 7 June Saturday 4:30pm
Session Four 7 June Saturday 6pm (+ artist’s talk)
Session Five 8 June Sunday 3pm
Session Six 8 June Sunday 4:30pm
£8 for sessions with artist’s talk and £5 for other sessions | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Running time: 32 minutes. The screenings will be presenting a collection of eight short moving image videos made by Sophie Standford, including:
Dialogue with my Father (2022-2025)
Duration: 7’20” Location: Suffolk
What if you can’t allow yourself to let go of something because it reminds you so profoundly of the person who has gone? What if this holding on to the past has become self destructive, to the point where objects are taking over?
Dialogue with my Father explores the inter-generational relationship between father and daughter; grief and loss; the piano that belonged to my father, on which he used to compose. I push the heavy bulk of this domestic, upright instrument around on the concrete floor trying and failing to find it space in the room. Frustration strips the piano of its dignity, tortured and destroyed. Braced, it fights back stoically, belligerent, vibrating a dance to its raucous rumbling, as its dainty wheels twist in agony under its defiant weight. In contrast, the video takes you on a mesmerising journey inside the piano accompanied by a composition that gives voice to its involuntary creeks and resonances.
Home (2011)
Duration: 2’42” Location: London
Home is a performance to camera. It is transparent in its construction: born out of frustration; of playing the role of mother; of confined living space; trapped by domesticity, responsibility and a sense of duty.
my Mother and Me (2023)
Duration: 3’46” Location: Suffolk
my Mother and Me is a tender animation with awkward, imperfect melody composed using a hand-cranked musical movement. The fruit is a quince, Cydonia oblonga, grown in the forest garden; beautiful, aromatic with a feminine roundness; the downy skin of youth glows vibrant yellow and ages to deeply crinkled browns. In this animation the fruits, at different stages in their lives, suggest the cyclical generations of mother and daughter, the one nurturing the other, taking turns simply to hold each other in an all encompassing embrace. The awkward, distorted melody repeats; a lullaby? Or perhaps a lament?
‘My art practice is motivated by the intensity of life; noticing the minutiae, tracing encounters with nature, informed by the sights, sounds and smells of the real, the imagined and the remembered, coalescing with the passing of time.
I use moving image to work alone performing unannounced and unrehearsed, capturing fleeting moments, within the parameters of a loosely defined framework which embraces the aleatory; extending ideas into the imaginary.
My work records and documents a subjective, observational, poetic narrative, diverse in form and content, both reflective and responsive, allowing the humour and absurd to interact with the melancholy and disquiet of my findings; to shimmer briefly in your imagination.’
Standford obtained BA Fine Art (1st Class Hons) at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (1994); studied for MA Enterprise and Management of the Creative Arts at London College of Communication (1998); Post-graduate Diploma in Law, London (1996); led art residencies and workshops in the Life-long Learning sector for 16+ and adults with learning difficulties while home educating her son (2002-2015); studied at Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon to commence the Forest Garden Project in East Anglia (2016); made Literary Executor of the estate of her father composer, teacher and writer Patric Standford (2024); returned to full time art practice in 2018; attended Field Recording Residence Murmuration#3, Scotland (2022) and has since had work broadcast on Framework Radio.
sophiestandford.com | @hortus_silvam
Images from Sophie Standford
