Recovering a forgotten archive

Veiled from I Also Fight Windmills, available as a special edition print.

A literary discovery

Ready came to photography from a literary background and first came across Sophie’s work when she was contacted by a Polish film producer who had translated the only publication of Sophie’s work into Polish. “At the time I used to run literary events in Oxford,” Ready explains, “and this story of a migrant woman from Eastern Europe who travels to Paris, New York and London to find employment and fulfil her creative ambitions of becoming a writer intrigued me right away.”

As the partner of the French modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sophie’s work was mainly read in order to extract details of his life, but once introduced to it, Ready saw something far more significant. “Many of the themes in Sophie’s work mirrored those in mine: a shared Polish heritage, experience of migration, belonging and alienation,” Ready continues. “She was known to so many artists and influential literary figures in London in the 1910s, but she was never recognised as a writer in her own right. She showed some work to Ezra Pound but nothing came of it. Later, when W.B. Yeats read extracts of her writing (after Sophie’s death), he thought that she had a talent and would have been a great novelist. However, that in itself didn’t lead to any further research into her literary texts for decades to come.”

Visually responding to a written archive

Ready began to explore the idea of a visual response to the archive, planning to bring Gaudier-Brzeska’s story, as well as her writings, the attention she believed it deserved. It soon became a passion project and a way to address the injustices of the past. “My ambition was to take Sophie out of her partner’s shadow and acknowledge her as a writer in her own right. I admire her work and believe she should be better known. But I had no idea what I was getting into at the time.

“Sophie's archive is trilingual, which is a wonderful linguistic and literary achievement, but at the same time poses a significant challenge for research. Sophie often wrote a draft of a text in one language and then rewrote it in another language. I speak Polish and English so I had to rely on help from friends, translators or previous researchers to access her work written in French. Sophie was a true European, and being able to handle a Slavic, a Romanesque and a Germanic language gave her access to different cultures and modes of expression.”

Double from I Also Fight Windmills

Bringing old work to light

With the publication of her literary photobook I Also Fight Windmills and an upcoming solo show of her images as part of Photo Oxford Festival, Ready brings Gaudier-Brzeska’s story of displacement, loneliness, exclusion, thwarted ambition and incarceration to a whole new audience. Figuring out how to unlock the brilliance of Gaudier-Brzeska’s archive for new audiences was a challenge however. 

“I wanted to share Sophie's thoughts and preserve her work,” Ready explains, “Her archives are in three languages and four collections across the UK and France so accessing them is difficult and time consuming. I hope what I have achieved with this exhibition and book is a way to activate the archive by giving it a different, visual life.” Alongside the imagery, Ready includes audio recordings in English and French of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work in the exhibition, done by voice-over actor Verity Kirk, while her book includes more texts in their original languages.

Manuscript of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska's work. Available as limited-edition print 

Marrying photos and text

Ready collaborated with designer Victoria Forrest from Vika Books to bring her project to life. “I found marrying the text and the photographs really difficult. Putting excerpts from Sophie’s archive together with my images felt a bit flat. The photographs often became illustrations when set against her haunting diaries and sharp, autobiographical texts which was not what I wanted to achieve.” Forrest, however, came up with the idea of a book within a book with imagery printed on thick, white paper, and the text on smaller, yellow pages that mirrored the original writings.

Longing for Home from I Also Fight Windmills

On the Way from I Also Fight Windmills