PALMSTONES
Sophie Mak-Schram
Palmstones was created by artist Sophie Mak-Schram in conversation with our arts and health groups, about ideas of holding. From who and what we hold onto, to holding as a support structure, as a means of reassurance, or as a grasp, together, they looked at the roles objects play in strengthening, soothing, and connecting us.
Sophie joined and led sessions with our weekly Create with Confidence and Living with Dementia groups, exploring ideas around holding through sharing objects and their stories. These became the starting point for experimenting with sculpting and pattern making, drawing loosely on different cultural practices of sharing objects with kin and different types of scaffolding and support structures.
Palmstones combines details, photographs, and scans of the objects and session outcomes, with images from Sophie’s ongoing collection of water videos, and light fittings from our building – which were installed back in 1999 and replaced in April 2026. The words, hand, held, hold, connect to other ideas of support and wellbeing, reflecting both our approach as an organisation, the community and atmosphere we nurture through the arts and health programme, and the ways in which objects can cross time and hold histories of care.
By layering these objects and patterns together through digital collage, Sophie has brought together different people’s supports into a single image. By presenting it in our Billboard Gallery these supports extend out, beyond our building, offering others something to hold onto.
Sophie worked with our groups throughout April and May 2026 and will be returning for some final sessions later in the year.
There will be an opening in the gallery on Saturday 13 June, 12-2pm, and the Billboard will be on display until Spring 2027.
Before the opening, Sophie will be giving a short Artist Talk at 11.00am in Gallery 2. Book a free place here.
This is part of Llantarnam Grange 60, a year-long celebration of 60 years of creativity in Cwmbran. Funded by the Colwinston Charitable Trust.
SOPHIE MAK-SCHRAM
Sophie is an artist who works with others to create place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. This work is informed by personal and shared experiences of cultural difference, coloniality, race and gender.
Often using the metaphor of the ‘tool’ – as a poetic and practical object – Sophie works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently. A tool might be an access rider, a radical safeguarding protocol or a collectively written welcome text, or it might be a ceramic you can touch in the context of a look-don’t-touch museum, a megaphone, or a surreal cushion.
Recent projects include To Shift a Stone (2025-2026), commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter Arts Centre and Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (2024-2025) in collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk, commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland.
