Lucy Willow (UK): The Mourner – Lamentation in Dust
Tuesday 10.9. 10-12, 16-18
Wednesday 11.9. 10-12, 16-18
Thursday 12.9. 10-12, 14-16.00
Friday 13.9. 10-12, 14-16.00
VR Konepaja | Pohjolankatu 1, Kuopio
Through the act of ritually sweeping the space wearing black mourning clothes, areas of the building will be activated and considered in relation to its history and what can be found in the debris. The mourner is making a connection to the building and the materiality of death found in the dust. She collects, makes piles, walks through the space, she sweeps. She silently laments as she sweeps clean the space.
The mourner makes river channels in dust that flow through the building with illustrative details of reflections in water, a black swan and a boat to create scenes of contemplation. The illustrative details reference Tuonela, the Finnish underworld. The dust-rivers respond to architectural details of the space creating a work that invite audience to reflect on mourning and the separation felt between the dead and the living. The work explores notions of traveling to a dust isles of the dead and the divine beauty that can be present in sorrow. Mythology often suggests an active exchange between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The mourner’s lamentation in dust explores this exchange.
Lucy Willow is an artist and full-time senior lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University. Working with dust, memorial debris, objects, sound and installation she explores the idea of creating a material presence for the ‘dead’ to create a space where communication can take place between the dead and the living. Dust is used throughout her practice as a metaphor for death addressing the way in which visual culture represents death and dying, mourning and grieving through imagery. She is interested in memorial sites, nowhere places, landscapes with no boarders and spaces that don’t always make rational sense. Specific sites that are in a state of ruin or transition inform her work. The installations become a psychic space that invite audience to contemplate the landscape of mourning and loss.
http://www.lucywillow.org/projects.html