A MYTHOLOGY OF MOURNING
The black sun is a paradox. It is blacker than black, but it also shines with a dark luminescence that opens the way to the most numinous aspects of psychic life.
Black Sun
Inside the ash tree at the far end of the memorial garden is an icy cold dark space. The blackness is so deep and so cold is spills out into the garden and can be felt mixing with the warm air. The hole is lined with a glowing luminous green moss. The darkness beckons you in, pulls you towards it like an event horizon around a black hole. It is the entrance to an ancient well. The roots of the 200-foot ash tree entwine around it holding it firmly in place. Five small stone steps lead downwards towards its inky black water. Sorrow connects me to something profoundly beautiful I can’t describe in words. My relationship as mother to a dead child exists in poetry, metaphor and artwork. This is where we communicate. It is driven by longing.
Working intuitively with materials such as clay, dust, drawing, sound and video I am able to tell my story of loss and grief. Poetry and metaphor emerge from this internal void, this empty womb that allow me to create a mythology around death and mourning. At the bottom of the well I imagine a woman living down there. The mourner. A lonely figure residing in the well examining the bones of the dead as they pass through, a gate keeper to the underworld lamenting the sous of the dead.
Through lived experience of traumatic grief a deeply symbolic mythology has emerged. A mythology of the mourner as a character who as a vessel has the capacity to hold within her the grief of the world. She is as an archetype, a conduit, allowing sorrow to pass through her body and into the dark water of the well. She is the mother of mourning and able to express the sorrows of those grieving. She utters raw unearthly sound lamenting the loss of family and friends bathing their souls in the often beautiful sounds of grief. It is sound that you hear on the inside. She has the ability to channel the grief of a community. She is not afraid of the sound of grief.
I Imagine there is an umbilical cord that stretches down into the depths of the well connecting me to the emptiness felt in my womb, the black space of the well. From this place of poetic dreaming images emerge. I work intuitively with charcoal on paper. The circular charcoal drawings have the feel of sonography, ultrasound waves scanning an internal empty space anticipating an echo. Things appear. Looking into the dark well water and drawing the fleeting forms that emerge also draws on magical practices relating to methods of divination such as scrying, where a medium would look into a vessel containing water in the hope of receiving a vision. The well as a metaphor has become a deep internal space, a site of excavation, and a meditation on the depth of grief. There is an echo in the well, it is the echo of longing, of grief, of calling out into the darkness and hearing your own voice bounce back to you.
Lucy Willow, 2023
Academic employment
Current Senior Lecturer Fine Art Sculpture, Falmouth University (2012-)
Selected exhibitions
2022 Drawn from the Well, Grays Wharf Gallery, Penryn
2019 ANTIfestival, Kuopio, Finalnd
2019 SOLITUDE: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery
2018 MANY AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange
2018 AT SEA AGAIN: Artist Led Project, Lamorna Village Hall, St.Just, Clarence House PZ
2017 TEARS OF THINGS: Exchange Gallery, Penzance
2016 INTERLUDE: Solo Exhibition, Guangzhou, China
2016 LOST FOR WORDS: project Room, Falmouth University
2015 DUST: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery
2014 UNSETTLED: ENYS HOUSE
2014 FALLEN: KESTLE BARTON, solo show
2013 PRIMORDIAL DARKNESS: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery
2013 DARK ROOMS: The Cast Institute, Helston
2011 GHOSTS OF GONE BIRDS: Liverpool School of Art
2011 ABUNDANCE: Kestle Barton, Cornwall
2009 GLORIA: Shoreditch, London
2009 WASTELANDS: Newlyn Art Gallery
2009 MEMENTO MORI, Solo Exhibition, Millennium, St.Ives
2007 REVOLVER: PZ Gallery
2007 Canary in the attic: solo show, Salt Gallery, Hayle
2007 ART NOW: Tate St.Ives
2006 Twisted: Here Gallery, Bristol
2006 Art in Hotels, Brighton Fringe Festival
2006 Make it real, Whitstable, Kent
2005 Transition 6, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall
2005 Art in Romney Marsh, 2005
2004 Smithfield Abattoir, Wrestling With Angels, London
2004 Taxi Gallery, Cambridge
2002 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Artist in Residence
2016 AIP INTERNATIONAL RESIDENCY 1 MONTH, Guangzhou, China
2015 HERE ARTIST RESIDENCY Iceland 1 month residency
2013 Kestle Barton, Rural Centre for Contemporary Arts
Publications
Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/malady-and-mortality
Conference Papers
2022 Death and Culture 1V, York University
Paper: The Dust of Objects
2018 Remember Me The Changing Face of Memorialisation, Hull
Paper: At Sea Again, The Shifting Memorial Ground.
2013 Malady and Mortality, Falmouth University
Paper: Transience: exploring the relationship between ephemerality, mourning and loss through dust and place.