‘I wanted to show young people in Jersey that you can be ambitious’

THROUGHOUT her career, fine artist and sculptor Lulu MacDonald has been captivated by her Island home of Jersey. Memories of local traditions and landmarks haunt her work, from the woven texture of Battle of Flowers floats to the Madeiran vegetable crockery she collected from charity shops as a teenager.

The Hamburg-based artist has now returned to the Island to present an immersive and expansive exhibition that was commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey and made possible by a generous donation from a private individual.

The result of two years of research, The Things Forever Speaking will showcase installations, sculptures and soundscapes from Thursday 16 to Sunday 25 July in an unused retail space by the Premier Inn on the corner of Charing Cross and Pitt Street. Here we speak to Lulu about her work and what we can expect from her exhibition…

Tell us a bit about your show.

The Things Forever Speaking is an installation of contemporary sculpture that I’ve been working on for two years. Influenced by the Art Nouveau movement, my work features undulating shapes, curves, and echoes natural forms and tries to imagine a world where nature, not humankind, is the main protagonist. By shifting this focus, I’m asking viewers to think about their relationship with the world around them – something that is crucial during a climate and health crisis. During this pandemic we’ve all had to confront our own vulnerabilities in a moment where we’ve been denied closeness with our nearest and dearest. In this vein, I’m making work about connectedness, love, loss, the fear of dying and of experiencing illness.

This is also a show about my own personal and contradictory relationship with Jersey. Although I grew up and regularly come back here, I find myself struggling with questions of whether I should return and what it means to come from here.

The Things Forever Speaking is a quote from the poem Expostulation and Reply by William Wordsworth, can you tell us a bit about the title of the show and why you chose it?

In the poem Wordsworth stages a conversation between his schoolmaster, who believes that books hold all the world’s wisdom, and his younger self who prefers to learn about the world by simply experiencing it. When I read this poem it really resonated with my time at school in Jersey. When I was a teenager we were still being told that if we did creative subjects for A-level then we would never get a job. I even remember being told that I shouldn’t take art GCSE because I wasn’t a good enough painter. Thankfully, I think our definitions of what it means to be an artist and even how we value a creative mind in a range of workplaces has come a long way since then, but when I was a student, it really knocked my confidence.

When I had the call from the director of ArtHouse Jersey, Tom Dingle, offering me the show, I immediately thought of myself at 16. This show is for her. At that time I had just left school and enrolled at Highlands to do the BTEC in Art and Design. I felt really scared and very much like I was putting all my eggs in one basket so now, 15 years later, I think about how proud my teenage self would be that I’ve been invited back to the Island to build a sculpture show.

I wanted this exhibition to show young people in Jersey that even if the way your mind works doesn’t fit neatly into a box, you can still go on to achieve incredibly ambitious and successful endeavours.

What does it mean to you to be showing this work in Jersey?

Jersey has been part of my inspiration since forever and I really wanted to combine stories, histories and memories of this place that anyone who has lived here will remember; moments that we share, special things only we understand. At the same time I wanted to make a show about both sides of Jersey’s complexities, its smallness, its irrelevance, but also its wonder and the fondness Jersey people have for their Island home.

The show has been hugely affected by Covid 19 (it was supposed to happen last summer). Can you tell us what has happened?

This show was commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey back in 2019 and was due to take place this time last year. While it would have been lovely if this all went to plan, it also would have been completely wrong. The initial hope for the show was that it would go alongside a major community outreach programme consisting of workshops with elderly people and chronic pain sufferers. In a way, I am glad the show was postponed as I would have never felt comfortable working with people who were so vulnerable during the first waves of the pandemic. Since then I have exhibited three times in Germany and so a lot of the work originally intended for this project got made and shown for those exhibitions. As a result of the postponement I have had time to reflect on the current moment and ensure that I was really conscious of what I brought over to show in Jersey.

I have also had a year with my two young children at home. In Hamburg, where I’m based, we have been in lockdown without childcare (bar two months in summer 2020) so it has been a difficult time for me personally. However, these ideas of belonging somewhere and being displaced somehow have only enriched elements of my work which explore anxiety, emotional fear and the sense of being vulnerable.

In the show there is a big emphasis on collaboration; you have collaborated with your siblings – writer Martha MacDonald and performer and physical theatre practitioner Joss MacDonald – as well as costume designer Katharina Kindsvater, local stained-glass maker Jo from J M Emporium and with local baker Pawel Zygiewicz from Dough Rye Me. What does collaboration mean to you?

While the majority of the work that will be shown at this exhibition is conceived, designed and built by me, there are some specialist elements that benefited from the skill sets of my collaborators. This collaboration happens on different levels – from commissioning skilled craftspeople such as Jo to create four stained-glass hats for me, to a deeper, more entangled collaboration shown through the line of vegetable clothing or the poetry anthology.

It’s really important to me that everything shown in the exhibition is well-executed and finished to a professional standard, so if I want to exhibit across mediums I’m not highly skilled in, then it’s a great opportunity to collaborate with other artists and makers.

For example, when I had the idea that I wanted to publish a poetry anthology to accompany the exhibition, it would have felt ridiculous for me to try my hand at poetry rather than working with my sister who is an actual poet. I’ve worked a lot with Martha, and I think she articulated what collaboration means to me really well in a text she wrote for the catalogue of my last show: ‘[Through multiple collaborations] Lulu’s work has been digested and regurgitated multiple times over, enriching itself like soil.’ That, for me, is the reason to do it, to trust people and compost ourselves and our ideas together.

You use an incredibly diverse range of materials in this show – concrete, Tadelakt plaster, fabric, bread, wallpaper, metal – what drives your choice of materials?

They’re drawn from my studio-based practice and a curiosity about how a material works and what it means, emotionally, physically and within literature – my second big love. The experiments I conduct in the studio are always about working out my big interests – how does this material convey time, pressure, or boundaries, sick bodies, barren landscapes, hopelessness or troubling feelings as well as ideas of preservation, coping strategies and hopefulness?

One sculpture in this exhibition features breasts made from cabbage loaves – baked by local artisan bakers – and these are a good example of how materiality is a form of storytelling. In Germany, cabbage leaves are used to treat infections caused by breastfeeding. When I had my first child my midwife told me that the leaves would draw out the infection and soothe the pain. I sat there feeling like I had two cabbage loaves stuck to my chest, but because this kind of bread is only made in Jersey no one in my new home knew what I was talking about.

The material of the cabbage leaf had me stuck in this memory of growing up eating cabbage loaf. After researching it I discovered that the servants who would normally only get to eat the burnt bits of the bread took to wrapping loaves in cabbage leaves so that none of the loaf would burn. So, this material tells two stories which are both tragic in their own way, but wonderful and lovely too. That’s when a material feels right: when it is complex, pluralistic, both joyful and sad.

I also try as hard as I can to use sustainable materials. I have no interest in making work about the environment and then pouring acrylic epoxy resin all over it – so I am conscious of my materials in that sense as well.

The show itself will take place in the centre of town, on the corner of Pitt Street and Charing Cross. Tell us a bit about the space itself and the challenge of building a show in such an unusual place.

It’s amazing to have such a large space. It feels as monumental as having an institutional exhibition somewhere. The scale is just amazing and I’m so excited to fill it. I’m also glad that the building is relatively new, so people aren’t likely to have any preconceptions or associations with it. When I first viewed the space I discovered there is also an unintentional sound installation, due to the naked tubes running from the hotel above. I’ve incorporated this unexpected ‘water feature’ into my curation of the work.

How has ArtHouse Jersey supported you in delivering this exhibition?

ArtHouse Jersey has always believed in my work. They invested in a show straight after my bachelor degree. I had won a big prize after graduating from the Slade and wanted to make something that I just couldn’t afford to do at the time. I was fresh out of university, knee deep in debt and they swooped in and backed me. Having an organisation believe in your work and back it with that kind of support is invaluable for an artist.

For The Things Forever Speaking, through the support of a very generous donor, they have funded the show and my research, tracked down the space, and guided me through the challenges of putting on a solo show during a pandemic, helping navigate all the scary bits that happen in between.

What’s next for you as an artist?

I’ve just been awarded an Arbeits Stipendium (Arts Living Scholarship) in Hamburg which means I’m funded for a year to make work. My living costs are covered as well as materials and a studio. So, I’m going to spend the year in my studio. For the past 12 months I’ve been doing a lot of shows and have been really focused on presenting, so it’s time to return to a crucial part of my practice – slowing down, researching and preparing for the next big project. I’m also really looking forward to embarking on a course honing my skills in eco-friendly plastering techniques.

The Things Forever Speaking exhibition will take place by the Premier Inn on the corner of Pitt Street and Charing Cross from Thursday 16 July until Thursday 29 July between 11am and 6pm from Monday to Saturday and noon to 4pm on Sundays.

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