Dropping By: Sophie Wilson’s romantic entanglement with Crowland Manor

Sophie Wilson doesn’t do perfect. When we first spoke to the artist and founder of 1690 Store about making a film about life in Crowland Manor, the tumbledown house she and three of her children have called home since 2014, she warned us that we would have to “take us as you find us”. “We live alongside history here,” she continued, “rather than steering away from it.” When we finally arrived at the house, taking in the pentimenti-like texture of the crooked walls, the thatch of centuries-old fenland reeds visible through a gash in the hallway ceiling, her kids’ impish graffiti on the playroom walls, we quickly understood what she meant when she’d said “I don’t understand why everyone wants to fucking fix everything”. For Sophie, beauty is to be found in flaws, not in spite of them.

Instead of fixing, Sophie wants to preserve. The difference to her is that where one sanitises, the other accepts, respects and makes allowances for. With that in mind, she has endeavoured to pay heed to the lives she feels have gone before her at Crowland. As she explains in the film, “I really wanted to be part of that noise.” And, by bringing the jumble of family life – sometimes joyous, sometimes less so – to this equally imperfect place, Sophie feels she is doing the building justice. (Though, she admits, “if I can get a new roof on it, I’d be thrilled.”)

Her work plays into this too. Sophie’s handsome sgraffito-slipware ceramics – terracotta salt boxes, butter dishes and chargers, all made by hand in a requisitioned scullery beside what’s known as the “middle kitchen” – are poetic expressions of the tug of history she feels here, often inscribed with literary bon mots and bygone rhymes. In fact, they came into being as a direct consequence of the house. When Sophie first began detangling the snarl of a garden she found here, she unearthed a wealth of ancient pottery shards that appeared like “a chronology of ceramic techniques”. These discoveries, she says, have had a really significant effect on her art. Her ambition, she continues, is for “whatever I produce from here to go out with that same degree of provenance”.

When it comes to her children, “I think they’re beginning to understand the value of this building’s authenticity,” she says. Sophie herself needs no convincing, however. “I think because it’s so wonky and flawed, it’s a human place. It’s very close to being human… And so it’s easy to love.” In fact, everything Sophie says feels guided by this big, heart-swelling sentiment. “I’ve always thought this house is the love of my life,” she goes on. So what about the future, then, when life inevitably shifts and priorities change? Sophie is as unsurprisingly sanguine as she is hopelessly romantic. “I would leave this house for love, but nothing else.”

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