artcornwall

Lucy Willow

Having been brought up in Kent, Lucy moved to Cornwall in the early 90s. Training initially in graphic design, she graduated from Falmouth College of Art in 2003 with First Class degree in Fine Art.

Since then she has exhibited widely, and led numerous community art based projects with a diverse section of the community. She is visiting tutor at Falmouth College of Art and Camborne College, and she has recently been awarded a millennium award for the project in-transit, a mobile artist led space (picture left), which aims to bridge the gap between contemporary art and rural community events.

Fascinated with British culture, and with past times and customs, it is the universal dark underside of these things that often drives her work. Her most recent pieces explore wedding traditions and the points at which something pleasurable and desirable becomes repulsive (picture right below). Her work often derives from craft traditions, which are manipu-lated and subverted to such an extent that they speak of excess and become sculptural monuments of bad taste.

Recent commissions include making a Hieronymus Bosch inspired rug in white marble dust as part of a multi media dance performance, Wrestling with Angels, in an old abattoir in Smithfield, central London (picture below). The work is usually made on site and for a particular con-text. During the past year she has become interested in realizing ideas and projects through groups of people in the local community.

Much of the previous year was spent knitting an over grown garden of remembrance for the Taxi Gallery, an artist-led space in a black London cab which sits in a suburban garden in Cambridge (picture right). For this project, a knitting pattern was made and published on the Taxi Gallery website.  Members of the public and local community were invited to respond by knitting a flower to contribute to the final installation of knitted flowers that went into the taxi during the exhibition period.

http://www.taxigallery.org.uk/

http://www.art-in-transit.co.uk/

RW  July 2006