Lucy Williams
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Lucy Williams is a Brighton based artist. Having grown up in the South Downs, the artist continues to be informed by rural and coastal plant-life. Selected exhibitions include: Basketry, Rhythm, Renewal and Reinvention, a UK travelling exhibition, 2021, Earth Materials, Gallery57, West Sussex, 2023, and Petite, Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading Co., New York, 2025. The artist recently took part in the Winter Studio Residency at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, 2025. Williams’ practice explores plant materiality as it relates to basketry, probing the resilience and flexibility of fiber, creating intricate and complex forms.
Due to the nature of her material selections, the artist typically creates precise and small-scale domestic forms. Such materials range from, flax, dog rose, pond sedge and yellow-eyed grass, which she frequently cultivates or harvests herself. Highly process driven, Williams’ often does not know the final form of a piece at the point she begins weaving or binding. Instead, the works take shape from the artist’s muscle memory and gestures. From the intersection of domestic forms, such as baskets and brooms, her works unfold through technical and material experimentation.
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Works
Lucy Williams
Owl, 2026Lapping cane and Jacobaea maritima (dusty miller)14.5 H x 9 W x 6.5 D cm
5.7 H x 3.5 W x 2.5 D inFurther images
Description
Lucy Williams explores woven form through foraged, found and cultivated natural materials. Her practice is grounded in a fascination with the intrinsic properties and possibilities of these materials, evolving through a process-led and experimental approach. Drawing on traditional techniques while embracing unconventional methods, she creates works that feel both contemporary and timeless. Extending weaving beyond its domestic and utilitarian origins, Williams repositions it as a sculptural and expressive language. The structure of each material—its fibres, pores, density, and flexibility—directly informs the outcome, shaped further by the specific conditions of place and season in which it is gathered. The work is unrepeatable and holds a singular relationship to its source and the moment of its making. This series continues an ongoing dialogue between the organic and the constructed, revealing both the fragility and resilience inherent within the materials and how they perform. The process of making is slow, intuitive, and closely attentive. Underlying the practice is a deep ancestral resonance. Weaving is a shared human language, present across cultures and histories, rooted in locality, necessity, and resourcefulness. Williams engages with these histories while drawing on myth, folklore, and material memory, allowing the work to move fluidly across cultural boundaries. Through this, her practice articulates a quiet and enduring language of nature—one that connects material, maker, and landscape across time.Exhibitions
