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

my Mother and Me


colour HD video animation 3’46” with stereo sound composition, 2023
composed and performed on a 20 note hand-cranked musical movement
Location: Forest Garden, 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? 

Taking inspiration from the words of Carl Jung, ’Mother-love’, is one of the most ‘moving and unforgettable memories of our lives. It is ‘the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter and long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends…’

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

© Sophie Standford, 2025
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