About

Laura Ellen Bacon is renowned for creating extraordinary, grand-scale formed spaces in willow. This selling exhibition provides an opportunity to experience Bacon’s intimate small sculptures as well as an interactive site-specific installation, handcrafted within the Hignell Gallery.

In this first solo exhibition of Bacon’s work in London, the tactile works have weight, presence and a strange quality — as if they have always existed. They use a language of form that feels familiar to the natural world. The exhibition is transportive in scale and a sensory delight. Upon entering the space, you first become aware of the fragrance of the willow and thatch. We are reminded that nature can still surprise us.

Bacon’s latest artworks often speak of the ‘bravery’ of a seed punching through the frozen earth into the unknown. Her open-air sculptures frequently become habitats for wildlife and her use of natural materials means that sustainability and climate resilience is woven into the sculptures she creates. The titles of her work, such as Reverie, reference the emotional and mental absorption she experiences when working with her hands.

Bacon’s installations have appeared across the UK, including Somerset House, Sudeley Castle (for Sotheby’s), The Holburne Museum and Blackwell – The Arts and Crafts House. In France, Bacon’s public projects transformed the Abbaye de Maubuisson outside Paris in 2022 and Château-Gaillard in 2023. Bacon’s commission for Chatsworth in 2020 is her largest to date. Created from 100 tons of local stone and designed to appear as if seeping from the ground and flowing down a woodland slope, ‘Natural Course’ is the monumental sculptural centrepiece of Chatsworth’s biggest garden transformation for nearly 200 years. The Denver Art Museum, in Denver Colorado, will host Bacon’s first US exhibit in summer 2024.

Join Hignell Gallery for an evening of discussion on Thursday 16th May, to celebrate and explore the exhibition with distinguished guest speakers, curator, writer and historian Glenn Adamson and chief curator of Pallant House Gallery, Melaine Vanderbrouk, to talk through Bacon’s practice and discuss how the lines between craft and fine art are blurring.