RESIDENCY

FRANCES GOODMAN

27 February - 9 April 2026

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During my residency at Nirox, I intend to expand a new body of quilt-based works that I began developing at the end of last year, in which the quilt is reimagined as a sculptural language rather than a domestic covering. Drawing on techniques learned from a master quilter, I approach stitching as a method of constructing illusion. Working from enlarged fragments of everyday objects, most recently the popped blister pack of a pill packet, I isolate forms and translate them into pieced fabric components. Cut from discarded costume materials and assembled through meticulous stitching, these fragments resolve into hyperreal objects that oscillate between solidity and fragility. At a distance, the works read as material optical illusions; up close, their seams, frayed edges, and labour-intensive construction reveal a delicate material truth.

The residency will provide an opportunity to expand and experiment with this process. I plan to push the sculptural potential of quilting further by scaling the works, exploring more complex forms, and testing how softness, surface, and stitch can produce convincing illusions of weight, volume, and material density. I am particularly interested in continuing to work with overlooked or discarded textiles, transforming them into objects that hover between deceptive visual illusion and fragile textile construction. Through this process, I hope to develop a richer visual language that both honours inherited craft techniques and destabilises their traditional associations with care, memory, and domesticity.

Alongside this textile-based work, I will continue to develop my ongoing ceramic practice, which explores the contemporary grammar of emojis. In recent work, I have translated these simplified digital pictograms, icons that compress complex human emotions into efficient, pixelated shorthand, into tactile ceramic forms. Through the slow, haptic processes of hand-building and firing clay, the fleeting emotional signals of digital communication are transformed into weighty, fragile objects that exist in physical time. The kiln introduces uncertainty and resistance, allowing the material to crack, bulge, or warp, reminding us that the analogue body cannot be easily flattened into code.

Together, these two strands of practice share an interest in translation: from image to object, from digital shorthand to material presence, and from the speed of contemporary communication to the slow labour of making. During the residency, I hope to deepen the dialogue between textiles and ceramics, experimenting with scale, form, and surface to develop new ways of rendering ephemeral contemporary symbols into tactile, sculptural experiences.