Sophie Standford
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Trace

Intangible Distance




Performance-document-text
16mm black and white film
transferred to single channel video
silent
1994 digital edit 2021
Performance: 30mins
Camera: Brian Catling
Location: Long Room, Oxford
The artist sits on a stool at the far end of the Long Room, her back to the visitor as they enter. The comb by her side invites the visitor to participate, to touch her hair, to use the comb. The intimacy created by her nakedness and the wetness of her hair heightens the challenge, increasing the awareness of an intangible discomfort between. The room is proportioned like a giant coffin, the silence hangs heavy as people shuffle about awkwardly, some coming forward to rise to the challenge and gently or otherwise comb and mangle her hair. The 16mm film documents the performance flickering in the pools of light cast from the windows above. A visceral expectation as the beams seem to breath like a giant ribcage.

I
A figure sits on a wooden stool, with her back to you as you enter the long tunnel of a room, longer that it is wide, heavy with beams and solid brick walls that stand five feet deep, offering only slits for light. You climb the stairs to be raised off the ground, to face a single head of hair. The hair that goes in the coffin. The hair that measures time. The hair that is closest to the mind.

Beside the hair is a comb, the single object whose purpose is clear. You are dared enticed, to pick up the comb and draw it through, to touch the life after death.

Will you enter into the tension that charges this room, where the hair continues to grow? Will you make contact by feeling this possession that belongs to another, spun from the silk worms inside?

Inside is thought and the turmoil of imagining
outside cultivates the infinite strands
II
The deep curvature of a spine
the angularity of a shoulder
a length of hair that saturates
a pair of seating arrangements
one a table one a chair
The wood of a floor that stretches a divide
The breeze of sunshine through an open door
raising bumps on skin
while the water drips
a pool of saturation gauges time
sitting in hushed silence to listen
Another whose blood is the space you occupy
timeless
in strands that reach down a back
covering the exposure of a neck
© Sophie Standford, 2025
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