Echoes from the well small
Exhibitions

Drawn From The Well

A new body of work by artist Lucy Wil­low includ­ing char­coal draw­ings and ceram­ic and tex­tile forms.

‘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.
Echoes from the well small
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