Content warning- some of Lily’s work is about stories of sexual violence. Please ensure you are comfortable engaging with this material; if not, here are a selection of pieces which are unrelated to the topic.
Lily is working towards her MA in Inclusive Art, she is an artist and facilitator who works with lots of different materials. Her BA from University of Sunderland in Glass & Ceramics means she loves using wet, squashy clay to make sculptures and images. She likes to make figurative art because that’s how people tell stories. Her interest in comics means she creates illustrations using ink and paint as well as mixed media, like textiles and glass.
She likes to make art about women, stories and memory. Women’s stories and how we remember them are fascinating, by making art about them Lily hopes to prompt people to ask questions about what is happening when we diminish the role of certain people in history.
Often the work she makes is meant to change, grow or be interacted with. That way even when she has made something by herself she can still involve others. The monuments she make crumble and fall and the portfolios she makes are designed to be scribbled in and built on.
The Represent Brighton research project collaborated with members of the public from Brighton to look at the problem of under representation in monuments, she created a new kind of monument: a nonument!. She piloted her workshop scheme at Comics Grid conference with academics studying comics and memory. She then developed the activities so participants could respond freely to prompts about monuments. The workshops ran for 6 weeks and the findings were presented as a research poster at CMNH’s Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Space and Place conference.
Lily works best when she can find out what lots of different people are inspired by. She likes to work side-by-side with people to research problems. She collaborated with Emma Jayne Nagouse, a PhD candidate at University of Sheffield, to look at the problem of how women who have been sexually assaulted in the bible are depicted, she created an interactive portfolio of work in response. Upcoming work will look at the problem of how depression is represented in autobiographical comics. She collaborates with artists, participants and clients to make her work and facilitate workshops.
The aim of her work is to look at how people are represented and how creating art about them could change how they’re viewed. Like bringing people back to life! But less scary.
Lily takes part in conferences as an artist to visually represent what speakers discuss, while in residence at Shiloh’s Religion and Rape Culture conference in 2018 she presented her visual portfolio, made illustrated notes for all the papers and created glass collages for all the speakers. During a residency at Out Of Control conference on a similar topic she facilitated Lino printing workshops and created individual Lino prints for each speaker. The goal of these workshops is to highlight speakers themes and create a visual legacy of the events.
She currently works at Milton Keynes Art Gallery as a Learning & Participation Coordinator to plan and deliver participatory art projects and programmes with a range of artists and participants.
