A Kind of Quiet Heat
Terracotta, slip, oxides and glaze, 2025
Sophie Gemmill is a Melbourne based potter creating work that lives somewhere between the ancient and the imagined. Working primarily with terracotta, she embraces its warmth and imperfections – its connection to earth, to hands and to time. Her pieces often take on organic forms, evoking the feelings of unearthed relics. Gemmill’s work often references storytelling, folk art and personal mythology.
In A Kind of Quiet Heat, Sophie Gemmill transforms terracotta vessels into containers for memory and place. Each piece captures fragments of a California holiday—terraced dinners, wildflowers, hotel pools—rendered in the warm, earthy tones of clay. Drawing from ancient pottery traditions and modern nostalgia, Gemmill’s vessels reimagine the souvenir as both relic and story, holding not water or grain, but the dust, the light, and the feeling of time suspended under the sun. Through these works, Gemmill reflects on how memory, material, and place intertwine, transforming fleeting moments of escape into enduring forms.
Email: Sophie.gemmill@hotmail.com
