DRAWN FROM THE WELL
LUCY WILLOW
5 - 26 NOV 2022
GRAYS WHARF GALLERY
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
‘Drawn From The Well’ consists of a body of charcoal drawings, porcelain ceramic forms and stitched textile sculpture made in response to an ancient well which Willow recently discovered under the roots of an ash tree at the far end of her garden in Lamorna, Cornwall. The work was made during a nine-month residency in a studio at CAST (Helston, Cornwall).
“The entrance to the well is deep and black, a portal reminiscent of an archetypal passage to the underworld, to hell, a hidden place. The well water seeps out and into the garden above. It has become a space I think of as a symbolic womb, a vessel, a dark passageway with tangled roots that leads to something unknowable. A place of longing.”
The circular charcoal drawings reference sonography, ultrasound waves scanning an internal empty space anticipating an echo. Porcelain fragments lie broken in pools of dust scattered across the floor as though tumbling out of something and down to earth. The visceral, sculptural, umbilical-like textile works are made from text printed onto fabric from old schoolbooks belonging to Willow’s son Jack Perry (1990-2006). The well as a metaphor becomes a deep internal space, a site of excavation, and a meditation on the depth of grief.
PUBLIC PROGRAMME AND RESOURCES
GALLERY TALK / Drawn From The Well
SAT 19 NOV 11AM
An informal talk by artist Lucy Willow where she discusses her current body of work and her wider practice. View a recording of the talk here.
Included in the exhibition is a zine where Lucy Willow writes about her practise and artwork. Click here to view a digital version of the publication.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Whitstable, Kent, Lucy Willow now lives and works in Cornwall.
Since graduating from Falmouth College of Art in 2003 with a First Class BA Honours degree in Fine Art, Willow has exhibited both nationally and internationally participating in residencies in Iceland (2016), China (2017), Kestle Barton, Cornwall (2013) and CAST, Helston (2022) making works in response to specific locations. Working with objects, artefacts and materials that relate to mourning and grief, Willow makes work using dust, sound, video projections and creative writing.
In 2020 Willow set up a project called DUST from a shop in Penzance. DUST contains a collection of artefacts, many of which are broken. The shop is an artwork inviting visitors to tell their stories and to share experiences of grief through the lens of the objects displayed.
Willow’s published works include The last Portrait, a microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss published in Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture (2016).
www.lucywillow.art
@artist_lucy_willow
www.dustltd.art
@d.u.s.t_art
images:
‘Echo I’ charcoal on paper
’Inner Roots’
(all images courtesy of the artist)
This exhibition is part of a new programme supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
