Before pursuing her career in fine art, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2017, Lucille Lewin was Founder and Creative Director of both Whistles and Liberty. A residency in Dehua, China inspired her sculptures for the exhibition Blanc de Chine: A Continuous Conversation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2019.
Lewin’s sculptures are fractured metaphors for the human experience through time. The choice of material echoes the ethereal beauty of Chinese porcelain, ruptured in an agitational birthing of form. Porcelain clay is modelled, dipped, slipped, cast, thrown, cut up, pressed and extruded. The elements are then broken and reassembled through gestural acts over months of handmaking. The glaze glistens, forming a strengthening and unifying skin, yet each form questions its own completeness.
The sculptures are both personal and political: abstractions alluding to figure, environment and architecture, symbolic of the interdependent ‘chaos we have created’. Social inequalities and distrust, created by power struggles over natural, spiritual and economic forces, are counterbalanced by a sense of wonder about frontiers of knowledge and the imagination. In her work, Lewin follows a line of humanistic enquiry from the Age of Enlightenment to artificial intelligence, a fashioning of identity concerning consciousness and conscience.