Tuesday 4 February 2020
11am – 12:30pm
Lucy May Schofield talks about her intriguing, evocative work.
Schofield is continually fascinated with belonging and dislocation, remoteness and ritual, separation and intimacy, time and impermanence, isolation and migration, repetition and remembrance, stillness and light, silence and rhythm, pilgrimage and place.
In collaboration with the expansive landscape and dark skies of Northumberland, Schofield marks the seasonal shifts with paper, ink, wood and silk to connect and convene with nature. Observing the way in which time behaves in remote and rural places has resonated in ritualistic acts of making. Meditating on the earth’s rotation, the phases of the moon and our relationship to light and time inspire performative acts in the landscape documented through printmaking, video, stitch and installation. In turning our attention to the temporal, every day is an event to be celebrated. Her work seeks to commune with nature inviting eyes to caress and inhabit the spaces she creates. Her works possess a sensitivity to time and mortality, meditating on our relationship to transience, imperfection and impermanence.
After graduating from London College of Printing in 2002, she was awarded a 2 year funded residency at Manchester School of Art, where she also worked as an Associate Lecturer until 2010. In 2011 she relocated to Japan, where her interest in printmaking developed. As joint recipient of a British Council International development award in 2015, she initiated a collaborative project at IMPACT 9 Printmaking Conference in China. The project traveled to Southern Graphics Conference International (SGCI) in Portland, USA in 2016. Later that year she was awarded a one year residency with VARC (Visual Artists in Rural Communities), in a remote part of Northumberland where she is still currently based.
Residencies at Hospitalfield in Scotland, Kala Art Institute in California and NES in Northern Iceland have informed a collaborative approach to research and developed an exploration in durational work in combination with printmaking. Works are held in public and private collections including Tate Britain, Yale Center for British Art, Stanford University, Chelsea College of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, State Library of Queensland and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recent work has been presented at Art Toronto, The London Art Fair and The University of Hawaii, where she was joint-recipient of the Awagami Paper Prize.
