Open Studio
Sophie Huckfield

Drawing on her connections with Hadfield Bridleworks, Walsall Gold Blockers, Sedgwick’s Leather, and research at Walsall Archives, Sophie has developed a series of moving-image works, sculptures, and writings that explore the many meanings of relief, from the physical act of embossing and blocking, to the emotional and collective ways we seek release.

Working with leather embossing techniques and gold-blocking stamps – made from corporate slogans of William Hill, where her dad worked on Walsall high street, and IKEA (Junction 9), where her mom worked in the 1990s, Sophie reimagines these everyday impressions as sites of memory and labour. She has also incorporated redundant corporate dies from Hadfield’s, once used to mark prestige onto surfaces, now reworked to question how corporations shape identity and belonging.

The artworks reflect on how work, craft, and industry leave lasting impressions on both place and people, becoming entwined in heritage narratives and the fictions corporations tell. At the same time, they ask how families and communities find their own forms of relief amid economic precarity, changing high streets, and the wider impacts of global policies on local industries.

Sophie will also share a short reading from her long-term body of writing Relief.