Julia Ellen Lancaster is an artist working with clay and ceramics. Lancaster’s work is driven by a compulsion to respond to emotional intuition, and externalise the impression that a time, or the feeling a space and its contents, provoke. Lancaster often works with wild clay, rocks and collected materials, exposing them to heat to alter their make up and structure, working intuitively to explore their qualities.

“At the centre of Lancaster’s work is the material. Partially sourced directly from the earth by the artist, these works combine clay, minerals and rocks in their raw form. Concerned by the environmental impacts of ceramic production, Lancaster throws nothing away, reincorporating detritus and rubble from the studio floor back into her sculptures. Often her works are left unfired so they shift organically and manipulate over time – sometimes by the hand of the artist, sometimes by the whim of the material. In allowing these forms to alter themselves, Lancaster draws attention to the fragile and transient nature of clay as both material and property of soil”.

Rose Thompson, Assistant Curator, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

“Both familiar and utterly alien Lancaster’s sculptures looked as if they had made their own way inside. Some will have scuttled, others somehow thrown there by a raging sea. They had an uncanny quality, of something found rather than made, as if by the turn of each tide they had grown…………Some appear excavated, born of the earth’s need to move and crush and compress. Their layered growth is stratified and archeological, a body proud of its history and entirely grounded in its sense of place. Built from foraged local clays and found materials their lineage is as Cornish as the view they keep sentry over’

Michael Harris, independent Curator and Curator & Deputy Director at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, Cornwall.

“Lancaster’s work is stunning and soulful, ugly and beautiful …….all the feels”

Faye Dobinson, Curator, Jupiter Gallery, Newlyn, Conrwall.