turntable gallery’s inaugural artist in residence. Sophie Dickinson is a Lincolnshire-based artist specialising in sculpture and a graduate of Manchester School of Art. Her work was collected through The Manchester Contemporary Art Fund in 2024 and now forms part of the public collection at Manchester Art Gallery. 

Investigating the historical, allegorical, and personal use of objects and spaces, Sophie’s practice explores humanity’s complex relationship to materiality and symbolism. Our interaction with material things becomes a subliminal offering: a mediation of the human condition that provides a sense of control, understanding, and permanence in our ephemeral existence. 

Salvaged domestic objects, archaeological finds, natural matter and the subjects of obsessive symbolic collecting are hybridised with sculptural elements crafted from wood, stone, ceramic and metal. Amongst these, volatile sculptural artefacts echo the forms we associate with symbolic importance: natural ephemera blurred into architectural beings, tracing a continuous transformation between organic object, pattern and symbol. 

By combining semi-recognisable found and created objects, Sophie’s work materialises the liminal. Sculptural assemblages act as spatial poetry, infused with personal and universal symbolism created from object reductions. They gesture toward the silent dialogues between objects in our landscapes, an unnoticed elegy approached through an archaeological sensibility. The work exists as esoteric manifestations of in-betweenness, interwoven with personal narratives of pain and perseverance.

Instagram: @sophie.fineart