Julia Ellen Lancaster MRSS

My work is connected to notions of beauty and the liminal space between attraction and repulsion. My sculptures retain a sense of precarity and chance, reflecting a continuous survey of humans’ relationship to the landscape (deeply connected and interchangeable) and a rapidly changing earth. Particular works use a process resulting in what might be considered ‘living sculptures’, whereby they will fade or evolve over time, mirroring the ceaseless changes happening in the environment.

The language of clay is a starting point, assembling and manipulating the material, introducing rocks, calcinated materials and detritus, and exposing the works to extreme heat. This approach causes the clay to crack and melt in unexpected ways, forming organic matter on the surfaces.

Through this process the works mimic primitive or other-worldly organisms that embrace the beauty of difference, imagining an intelligent future built from the remains of the past and the discarded. The work I make is born out of a desire to capture feelings and fleeting moments of our present, our thought, action and imagination, where worlds collide and the unacceptable becomes acceptable.