A Childhood Framed by Story
Sophie was born into a world where film-making, craft, and heritage were part of everyday life. Her parents, David and Sally Shaw-Smith, spent the 1970s and ’80s travelling across Ireland documenting traditional crafts, often with their children beside them as they filmed lace-makers, carpenters, boat-builders, weavers, and farmers. When Sophie was five years old, they turned the camera toward their own family, creating Sophie’s Films, a documentary that followed the small details of her early childhood. Years later, during her teens, they filmed another family documentary while living for a summer on the island of Corfu, capturing the easy, sunlit rhythms of those months together. Growing up within this world of cameras, stories, and skilled hands, Sophie learned early that creativity was not separate from life.
A Journey Through Craft
Sophie studied textile art and design at NCAD, where she developed a deep sensitivity to colour, texture, and the quiet narratives held within materials. Working across weaving, print, and mixed-media processes, she learned how pattern, repetition, and touch could shape a visual language as strongly as paint. Her years at NCAD became a period of exploration: experimenting with form, learning to trust instinct, and discovering how her own artistic voice could emerge from the interplay between craft tradition and contemporary design.
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A LIFE SHAPED BY LOVE
In her twenties Sophie moved to Kathmandu, where she met Romio, a Tangka painter who would become both her partner in life and in art. The two spent years exploring the Kathmandu Valley and the landscapes beyond it, travelling through temples, villages, and mountain paths that shaped their shared visual world. Nepal’s vivid colours, ritual traditions, and clear mountain light offered a striking counterpart to the softer palette of Ireland, and these experiences deepened Sophie’s instinct for atmosphere, pattern, and story. Her time there was a period of adventure, learning, and creative companionship—one that continues to echo through her work today.
A STUDIO IN KERRY
Sophie eventually returned to Ireland and designed her home and studio in County Kerry, shaping a space that reflects both her life in Nepal and the landscape she grew up in. The house has become a living backdrop for the family’s art, while the studio—filled with shifting coastal light, garden colour, and the quiet rhythms of rural Kerry—offers a profound space for exploration. It is here, surrounded by her husband and their four daughters, that Sophie paints. Her work is rooted in the natural world around her yet threaded with the echoes of her documentary beginnings, her adventures in the Kathmandu Valley, and the years she spent experimenting with craft and textile design.
