Lucille Lewin’s sculptures are fractured metaphors for human experience through time. The choice of material echoes the ethereal beauty of Chinese porcelain but it is ruptured in an agitational birthing of form. Porcelain clay is modelled, dipped, slipped, cast, thrown, cut up, pressed and extruded. The elements are then broken and reassembled through gestural acts over months of handmaking. The glaze may glisten as if providing a strengthening and unifying skin to a body, yet each form questions its own completeness.
This is a deliberate ambiguity that reflects the questions Lewin asks of life. The sculptures are both personal and political: abstractions alluding simultaneously to figure, environment and architecture, symbolic of the interdependent ‘chaos we have created’. Social inequalities and distrust, brought about by power struggles over natural, spiritual and economic forces, are nevertheless counterbalanced by a sense of wonder about frontiers of knowledge and the imagination. Her series titles, such as Second Nature andA Secret Life of a Pea: Post- Apocalyptic Regeneration, convey this potential. Lewin follows a line of humanistic enquiry from the Age of Enlightenment to artificial intelligence, a fashioning of identity concerning consciousness and conscience.
Lucille Lewin was born in South Africa in 1948 but the political and social upheaval of apartheid brought her to London. Before pursuing a career in fine art, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2017, she had an influential career in fashion as Founder and Creative Director of Whistles and Creative Director of Liberty. A residency in Dehua, China inspired her sculptures for the exhibition Blanc de Chine: A Continuous Conversation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2019. She is currently preparing a new series including wall and floor installations in her London studio.