Michael Harris

Independent Curator and Curator & Deputy Director, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, Cornwall.

“When I first walked into Julia Ellen-Lancaster’s Newlyn studio, Anchor Studio, built by foundation stones of the Newlyn school artists colony Elizabeth and Stanhope Forbes, I was, like generations before me, drawn to the enormous windows and their sumptuous views. Despite the staggering vistas, the azure bowl of Mounts Bay and the fairytale splendour of St Michael’s Mount, it was the group of small ceramic intrusions who had occupied the sills that intrigued me most.

Both familiar and utterly alien they 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.

There are so many tangential reference points to Resettling, Julia’s Anchor Studio work, and yet they’re difficult to pin down. Some pieces could have been salvaged from a long sunken ship, encrusted with barnacles, pierced with coralline intrusions, appearing to be one frame away from wandering off, in the manner of a Ray Harryhausen scorpion. I knew how their little legs would sound as they moved.

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.

For days the forms stayed with me, nagging away, they reminded me, they reminded me, but of what? And then one morning it came to me, caddisfly larvae! The larval stage of this extraordinary insect’s life is spent underwater where it uses a sticky silk secretion to build for itself an armour made of found materials, often using stone or organic matter. It’s protective, disruptive, transgressive camouflage appears simultaneously animal and mineral. Julia’s own living inanimate, in occupancy of a studio once home to John Wells’ abstracted birds who were also able to free themselves of their medium and fly.

Remarkably, Julia’s collage pieces, made during the same residency, come to life in the same way. Built with layers of texture and time they seem to transcend their 2D-ness and, like the rest of Resettling, have it in mind to move on.”