LAMB is pleased to present Sown in Slumber, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The series of new paintings were seeded in the quiet depths of winter, born from a period of hibernation and recovery, and emerge now in the season of rebirth, carrying with them a sense of slowness and fragility. Smorczewski’s works linger in states of ambiguity, the in-between spaces and places of nurture: the bedroom, the flower bed and the greenhouse.
Drawing from a period of illness in which the bed became a primary site of living, Smorczewski found in it a hotspot of activity rather than a passive, dormant space. Here, the active mind drifts, suspended between states of half-dreaming and half-awake, imagination folding into reality. She equates her bed to the flower bed in its tender nurturing where seeds of growth are planted and patiently wait for bloom, interior spaces expanding into the natural world. Smorczewski finds resonance with her grandmother’s greenhouse, a threshold space for slow growth where small seeds flourish and senses are heightened.
Smorczewski's process involves oil paint applied in thin, translucent layers, building up surfaces slowly over time, each mimicking the measured growth of her subject matter. The resulting images are little fragments of experience, capturing a soft and fleeting quality of light where interior and landscape are blurred. Light floods into the bedroom and the swirling vibrant hues of the sheets echo the glow of flower beds. Her painterly practice is complemented with remnants of the natural world, such as dried flowers and the pieces of oak on which she paints, drawing the outside in. Gathered materials root the ephemeral in the tactile. Some of this oak is reclaimed from a tree brought down in a storm, removed from its environment, further evoking a sense of fragility.
These paintings look to the moments in limbo, dawns and dusks, the luminosity of the garden at night, rainfall while the sun shines bright, the bulb planted in winter anticipating the promise of spring. In Smorczewski’s body of work, the season of slumber captures the delicate nature of something on the cusp of bloom.
Sophie Smorczewski is a London-based painter who recently graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2025), where she was awarded the Cass Art Painting Award. She graduated from Manchester School of Art (2021), receiving the Manchester Academy of Fine Art Prize. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, most recently, The Blue of Distance, SETAREH, Berlin; Natural Recall, Arden + White Gallery, CT, USA; IMMATERIAL at Soho Revue, London, UK and Through the Splinters at Silian Gallery, London, UK among others.