Lucy Willow

Qualifications

Research interests and expertise

Acknowledging the way in which visual culture represents death and dying, mourning and grieving through art, imagery and poetry is central to my research. Death and dying are integral to art and literature. Death generates a creative response in artists, writers and the individual through memorializing and making visible the space it occupies. Through the establishment of a research group Café Morte (2014) we facilitate bringing communities of creative practitioners, (artists, writers, performers, curators) together to examine how in the space after death, creativity takes place. Current research explores the idea of a ‘dead’ landscape as a psychic space where communication can take place between the dead and the living. Through working with dust, human ashes and memorial debris I am interested in creating a material presence of the dead. Creating mourning codes and rituals I am interested in how we incorporated the dead into life through contemporary art practice as a way of commemorating and remembering. Through objects we are able to process complex feelings following as the object/artwork mediate between the dead and the living binding the dead to the living.   As the bereavement narrative details are missing from my work it is based on the feeling and sensations of loss and the instability and uncertainty that bereavement brings.  I am interested in the relationship between private and public memorial space and how social interaction with the work can generate a dynamic encounter with bereavement, depression and melancholia that surround it. Published research: The last photograph: A microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual CultureISBN(13): 978-1-4438-9010-6

Research Topics

• death
• liminal space
• loss
• melancholia
• transience

Areas of teaching

• Drawing
• materiality
• sculpture
• site specific installation

Courses taught

• Fine Art BA (Hons)