Inundation, Laura Ellen Bacon

Roberts, Sara (2014) Inundation, Laura Ellen Bacon Ruthin Craft Centre

Abstract

Exhibition catalogue, to accompany large scale installation work at Ruthin Craft Centre.
Laura’s work treated the white-cube gallery like an architectural container, with four distinct forms appearing to pour in through the roof apertures, waterfalling to the floor, eddying and surging against the constraints of three of the walls, and concluding with a frontal wave at the wide, usual entrance to the gallery. Access via this entrance was thus rendered impossible, turning it into a viewpoint, whilst a side access allowed more intimate viewing of the length of the piece. Visitors were fairly contained by the piece themselves, forced up close to the billowing curves as they walked along the length of the only remaining wall of the gallery. The work was startling in its scale, and immersive.

Mass was created by multiple human-scale gestures in willow, the whole bound together and articulated through a kind of drawing in space with the material to describe the direction and force of the work. Laura has drawn analogies between the immersive nature of the process, an all-consuming inundation, and the recent extraordinarily destructive flooding in Somerset and North Wales. Her experience of the flood was after the event; the willow she uses is a crop grown in Westonzoyland on the Somerset Levels. Flooding is a natural and accepted part of the cycle of the seasons there, but in the last winter, record-breaking levels of flooding forced people out of their homes and caused physical, social and economic devastation. The waters subsided just in time for the willow growers to perform their annual cropping. But evidence of the event remained; Laura observed that a silty residue was left on the willow whips, up to a tide-line which marked the flood level on the crop. While this was easily washed away during use, the notion remained that these plants could carry evidence of the event, even through the processes of cutting, bundling and transport from Somerset to her studio in the Peak District.

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