Sophie
Standford
About

A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Work on paper
Sound
@hortus_silvam
Absent Presence Selected Works
Daughter of a Composer
 To pay homage to my father who was a composer, writer and teacher. An overdue series - my response to my father’s lack of expectations for me to become a musician. A Goldsmith’s educated composer, he brought me up to listen with deep attention and duration. I could never have lived up to his expectations of being a composer or musician of any sort, a repeated refrain which confirmed his own struggle balancing the artist’s life with having a family. Designated Literary Executor weighs an enormous sense of responsibility for the artistic career of another. Through his manuscripts and writing implements, his familial piano on which he composed, this project creates a space to converse with my father.


Dialogue with my Father



2022-2025
HD video 
stereo sound composition
Duration: 7’20”
Location: Suffolk
What if someone just cannot allow themselves to let go of something because it reminds them 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? The Dialogue with my Father series are performative videos which confront the loss and grief of an intergenerational father-daughter relationship through the insistent presence of the piano.

With particular focus on the piano that belonged to my father’s family, 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, dainty wheels twist in agony under its defiant weight, before taking you on a mesmerising journey inside the piano accompanied by a composition that gives voice to its involuntary creeks and resonances.

2025 screened as part of Dialogues by Sophie Standford (UK) 
DIVFUSE Film Archive No.1 with a theme on domesticity.

Dialogue with my Father: Piano


2023
HD video 
stereo sound
Duration: 8’00”
Location: Suffolk
Piano documents a performed act: I push the heavy weight of this upright instrument around on the concrete floor trying and failing to find it space in the room.


Dialogue with my Father: Meno Mosso


2019
HD video
stereo sound
Duration: 5’20”
Location: Suffolk
Meno Mosso is a short contemplative video work in which I gather ideas of contemplation regarding my father’s piano for the first time after his death. The title comes from his Cello Concerto manuscript score, written the year I was born, entrusted to me as literary executor, handwritten on tracing paper in preparation for print.


Dialogue with my Father: the archive (work on paper)

The extraordinary responsibility of sorting and caring for the archive of another artist; the proximity to their presence through handwritten manuscripts and notes; regret for the unspoken dialogues. An ongoing palimpsest of works on paper still bearing visible traces of the original hand.

2020-2024
Archive handwritten music manuscripts, archive printed notes, graphite, ink, gouache, photographs
21x30cm
© Sophie Standford, 2025
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