Lucy Williams: Beneath a woollen sky
Lucy Williams creates extraordinary, detailed, low-reliefs of deserted scenes of mid-20th century modernist architecture. These homes, swimming pools, railway stations, shops and factories are rendered in an array of materials such as card, Perspex, fabric, thread and pillow stuffing, put together with minute precision – each leaf individually coloured and applied, each iron railing delineated, each lamp cord individually strung.
In The Lighting Showroom (2006) based upon a Milanese shop, the composition is top heavy with lamps, hanging coolly above a bare grey expanse of floor. In The Study (2007) one of Williams’s largest and most ambitious works to date (based upon a case study house in LA by Craig Ellwood) the house glows from within, the expanse of blue pool in the foreground shimmering subtly in contrast to the dense and hectic foliage of the trees above and behind the house. In Haus Blumenthal (2007) the squat Bauhaus structure sits like a lonely monument to Modernism amongst the trees.
Perhaps the tension between the cool starkness of the chosen buildings and the obsessive handiwork in which they are rendered explains why these structures appear in Williams’s work to be isolated remnants of a bygone age. Some view Williams’s traditional craft-like and feminine materials, such as tapestry work skies in some cases, as a striking contrast to the masculinity of the hard edged Modernism she depicts. But Williams is chiefly interested in the play of representation possible to her by the fact that Modernism lends itself so beautifully to description in geometric and modular blocks of materials and colour.
