HEIRLOOMS OF THE FUTURE
Why Eleanor Lakelin’s carved wooden vessels are set to become collectables of the future
This month, in our series on makers whose work we believe is worthy of being passed down to future generations, we meet Eleanor Lakelin, a maker in wood, with her nger on the pulse of nature
Coronavirus made 2020 a year of disruption and uncertainty for many. But for woodturning artist Eleanor Lakelin, it was also a year of signi !cant milestones. A "er almost a decade of producing sculptural wooden pieces, her beguiling, almost ghostly, semi- eroded vessels and undulating carved organic forms reached a new level of recognition. This was the year that Echoes of Amphora Column Vessel I, 2020 – a substantial piece – was bought by the V& A, and another was commissioned by the Reading Museum.
With the virus to negotiate, there were some challenges. The Reading Museum commission was for an artwork to celebrate Reading Gaol’s most famous inmate, Oscar Wilde. The piece was to be made from several diseased horse chestnut trees growing outside the gaol, but work got o# to a tricky start when the country went into the ! rst national lockdown shortly a "er the trees were felled in early March. Meanwhile, the V& A acquisition, purchased at the Collect art fair in late February, also got stuck in lockdown, only reaching the museum’s sculpture gallery at the close of the year.
‘ It literally went on display just before the third lockdown started,’ says Eleanor, with a good-natured laugh. ‘ I think it was open for a week.’ The Reading piece, named Oh Beautiful World! a "er Wilde’s famous exclamation on being freed
from prison, also went on display in December. But, with the museum still closed, it can only be seen online.
Despite these frustrations, Eleanor is proud of her achievements and philosophical about the situation. She is grateful and relieved that she has been able to keep the lathe turning at her studio in Deptford, south- east London. This has allowed her to continue to carve and hollow out the chunks of tree trunk that are the starting points for her tactile vessels, which thrum with the rhythms and power of nature.
Eleanor works exclusively in two woods: sequoia and horse chestnut burr. Both come from trees grown in this country, usually taken down because they are blighted or dead, ! nding their way to Eleanor via a network of sawmill contacts. While the sequoia pieces explore landscape, the passage of time and the rhythms of growth and erosion, the burr pieces are concerned with nature as a dynamic force.
A burr is an anomaly in the growth of a tree that appears as a circular patch on a trunk or branch where an irritant has caused the wood to grow in a chaotic series of knots rather than in the usual linear way. ‘I am fascinated by this mysterious natural phenomenon, where the tree sets o" cells to bubble
over themselves, creating these ! ne li#le spikes,’ says Eleanor. She seeks out these pieces for her ‘voided vessels’, classical vessel shapes that on closer inspection reveal a riot of spirals and holes between the outer surface and inner space.
‘ There’s a sense of the shape of a vessel but it’s eaten away on some sides,’ Eleanor explains. ‘A burr is never symmetrical, it will always be dissolving. And I think that’s what the work is about. It’s about the dynamism of nature both in growing and decaying. It’s that contrast between the smooth and the textured, between order and chaos.’
It was a fascination with gnarled and deformed bits of wood that ! rst got Eleanor into making vessels. She has worked with wood since the mid 1990s, but spent the ! rst 15 years as a cabinetmaker, designing and producing furniture. A job that came to make her feel like she was ‘always cu#ing o" the most interesting bits’.
In an a#empt to move in a more creative direction, in 2008 Eleanor did a !ve- day bowl-turning course at West Dean College. A year later, having built a shed in the garden and invested in a second-hand lathe, she came back to it, this time teaching herself through books.
Over the next two years she spent all of her weekends and evenings experimenting with turning and carving. Her dedication paid o" when in 2011 she won a bursary from the Worshipful Company of Turners and Cockpit Arts for a year’s free studio space at Cockpit Arts, where she continues to work.
‘ The ! rst piece I made was called Skull Form,’ says Eleanor. ‘ I found this horse chestnut burr and took the bark o". It already had that beautiful colour of bleached- out material that I always liked and that reminded me of the bones and pebbles and bits of eroded wood that I used to collect as a child growing up in rural Wales.’
From this developed her process of picking o" every last bit of bark from the carved vessel, then sanding and sandblasting and, in the case of the burr pieces, bleaching to a#ain a ghostly, ethereal quality. ‘ I want the pieces to be very quiet and spiritual and a bit other-worldly.’ With the sequoia she a#ains a coarser, more earthy feel by scorching it or boiling nails in vinegar to make an iron solution that reacts with the tannin to turn the wood grey-black.
According to Sarah Myerscough, who has represented Eleanor since 2016, it is this visceral quality of the organic material that makes her work so appealing. ‘ It is not only tactile and $uid, but you are also u#erly intrigued by how these sculptural works are made; the horse chestnut burr is o%en mistaken for porcelain,’ she says. ‘ These are beautiful, dynamic and powerful sculptural works that connect intuitively to the natural world and reveal the ambition and creative skill of an exceptional artist.’