‘Significant Other: Bulging Water’ is an exhibition of felted, ceramic, stone, and salt sculptures produced throughout her experience and time of pregnancy. Goodchild’s approach to making is both connected to craft and the land through the elemental qualities in the making process. Materially, felt and ceramics derive from the fundamental need to contain, carry and protect, commonly descending from living organisms and their own surrounding ecosystems. A desire to locate a resemblance, a familiar spirit and kinship with the environment. A primitive, nesting, animalistic instinct; both estranged and entangled through a layering process. Through connecting histories of craft, Goodchild places focus upon touch through her making as ‘sensation as translation’; an idea rooted in the haptic; to feel within new realms and more importantly, to look at touch as potency.

“There is a sense of horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a physical thing with porous boundaries. Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body. Therefore each body is involved with every other living thing on earth…I thought that I might be able to capture the second body, trapping it inside a real body, by looking at it as a part of animal life. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated with a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away. To be a living thing is to exist in two bodies.” - The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard.

Photography by Jim Lineker, @lineker_photography