Working across sculpture and printmaking, Lucy Ellerton (b.1993) makes portraits of the people and places she knows intimately. Through labour-intensive processes, she creates objects evocative of her subjects. Disposable things familiar to us but used without consideration; loo roll, bin liners, scampi fries. In diligently recreating mass-produced objects,Lucy transforms throw-away objects into souvenirs representative of our contemporary culture; exploring the emotional associations we develop with ordinary things and asking how we assign meaning. Ideas of play permeate throughout Lucy’s practice. Her work conjures feelings of childhood: arranging doll’s furniture, occupying imaginary worlds. This act of make believe’ is embedded in the work. She constructs a tangible world, somewhere familiar but where the slightest awry detail betrays the fictitious nature of her built universe. These alterations feel uncanny; the work is so close to reality yet recognises its falseness. Her sculptures function as memorials of objects that have touched people’s lives, in an ordinary and insignificant way. Lucy Ellerton studied at The School of the ArtInstitute of Chicago (BFA, 2015) and The RCA (MA,2023) and has been a resident at the Bomb Factory Foundation since 2023.
