معرفی
Lucy Willow is a Senior Lecturer with subject specialization in sculpture at Falmouth University's School of Art, where she joined the BA Fine Art team in 2012. She currently serves as head of level 2 (2023), focusing on creative communities of practice through initiatives like Café Morte (2014), a research group she co-established with colleague Mercedes Kemp that brought together students, academics, and artists for critical discussions about death using objects and artworks as starting points.
- BA Fine Art, Falmouth College of Art (2003)
- PGCHE, Falmouth University (2012)
Willow's research explores death studies through the lens of material culture, investigating how bereaved people express loss through interaction with objects and how this often involves artistic creativity or the crafting of memory. Her work draws on global traditions from reincarnation beliefs to animism and Day of the Dead practices, creating spaces where communication can occur between the living and the dead. She examines death as 'the edge at which all narrative ceases,' where words, images, and sound emerge from 'powerful darkness.'
Her creative output consistently engages with transience, liminal spaces, and the material presence of absence. Projects like DUST (2020) and exhibitions including 'The Tears of Things' (2017) and 'Drawn from the Well' (2022) demonstrate her focus on creating tangible spaces for intangible experiences of loss. The recurring use of dust, broken objects, and ephemeral materials reflects her interest in the fragile boundary between presence and absence.
- Café Morte research group (2014)
- Lost for Words exhibition (2016)
- The Tears of Things exhibition (2017)
- DUST research group (2020)
- The Art of Grief bereavement stories (2021)
- Drawn from the Well exhibition (2022)
- The Shadow of the Moon Hospital Rooms commission (2024)
As an educator, Willow has established research groups that involve students in critical discussions about death and loss. She has conducted international teaching residencies, including at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in China (2016), where she collaborated with students on abstraction and creative processes. Her mentoring extends through DUST, which provides a platform for artists, students, and researchers to explore grief and remembrance through collaborative practice.
Willow's DUST project, established in 2020 from an old shop in Penzance, functions as both an artistic installation and research platform. The space contains artifacts, many broken, and invites visitors to share stories of grief through displayed objects. This project exemplifies her approach to creating tangible spaces for intangible experiences of loss, where 'metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance.'
