Lucille Lewin
Porcelain maker
London, United Kingdom
Violent porcelain
- Lucille works with porcelain, glass and metal
- Her work is powerful and thought provoking
- Turbulence and chaos, both human and in nature, inform her work
Lucille Lewin started her journey as an artisan at an evening class in ceramics, going on to study glass and ceramics at the Royal College of Art. Since then, she has exhibited in prominent venues across the UK, most notably at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Lucille combines porcelain, metal and glass to create work that speaks of the human experience, especially in relation to the natural world and the chaos that we have created. Her work, though crafted with traditional materials is conceptual, symbolic and abstract. The beauty of the material that she uses is contrasted with the violence of her techniques, each piece being broken, pulled and forced together over time. Her creative process reflects the act of living in a world at the tipping point.
INTERVIEW
I think I have always been an artist. I have a compulsion to make. I am committed to my materials: metal, glass and porcelain. They seem to occupy most of my waking hours and I see everything in relationship to this.
My work harks back to the beginnings of the 18th-century European porcelain tradition with glass and metal working. While the work is deeply tied to the historic, I use the material in a very gestural, non-traditional way. My work is as tied to fine art as it is to craft.
My work is autobiographical and draws from my past and childhood spent in South Africa. Nature, sky, sea, and landscapes are all indelibly printed in my DNA. The collision between humanity and nature is a constant theme in my work.
Walking into the large windowed room at the Victoria and Albert Museum at dusk and seeing the light touch my pieces. I was overwhelmed by the emotion and poetry of the work. I felt so happy to have chosen these materials as my path.
