Lorna Graves; Painter and ceramic sculptor
Hyfler/Rosner
24 August 2006
Judith Palme
Lorna Graves, artist: born Kendal, Westmorland 23 June 1947;
twice married; died Carlisle 23 July 2006.
Some of her work:
http://www.yewtreegallery.com/2004_June/LornaGraves.php
Inspired by the landforms and ancient art of Cumbria, the
artist Lorna Graves made paintings and ceramic sculptures of
magnificent simplicity. "I grew up here on the land," she
wrote, "working in the fields and byres as a child close to
the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of life."
She was born in Kendal in 1947, to young parents she
described kindly as "dreamers", but her early life was
unsettled and often hard. Moving through a succession of
temporary homes, she was passed across Cumbria, to be
brought up eventually by farming people near Hadrian's Wall.
Encouraged by her inspirational geography teacher at White
House Grammar School in Brampton, Graves pursued her
fascination with the structures of the land, and went on to
study Earth Sciences at Bedford College, London University,
earning a BSc in Geography and Geology in 1972.
After several years working as a librarian at Oxford
University, in her late twenties Graves began to train as an
artist, studying at Cambridge College of Art, then Carlisle
College of Art and Design. From then on, she was to work
full-time as a painter and sculptor.
The one tutor who really inspired her was the mystic painter
Cecil Collins; but the turning point in her work, she
explained, was an early commission to make studies from the
Ruthwell Cross, the eighth-century runic monument just over
the Scottish border. Sketching Ruthwell, and its Cumbrian
companion cross at Bewcastle, she was intrigued by the
carved depictions of Christ standing on the heads of beasts.
It was those carved Anglo-Saxon snouts which blended over
time with Cycladic and local Viking and Megalithic
influences to create Graves's highly distinctive forms.
Working with the archetypes of animal, human, bird, boat,
shelter, she stripped away individualising features, to
create symbolic forms with a rare purity of line. Alert,
nosing the air, her animal sculptures were titled plainly as
"Beast". Conveying a powerful stillness, these non-specific
creatures were neither calf nor deer, sheep nor bear, but
something essential and universal.
Although occasionally she worked on a larger scale, and
sometimes in bronze, the ceramic forms she always returned
to were compact and portable, asking to be cradled in the
palm of a hand. Her sculptures held the nature of stones,
rounded and smoothed by the sea, weathered by time, or worn
through generations of human handling.
Graves's paintings and sculptures show a universe not just
interconnected, but seamless. The tracery of lines on her
animals' flanks indicate fur and fleece, but those whorls or
nicks also evoke ripples of water or blades of grass. Her
long series, which began in the late 1980s, of Woman with
Wing sculptures present a slender female form sleeping under
the sheltering curve of an arch that is simultaneously a
feathered wing, a bird-pierced sky, and a tree-lined
hillside. Animal and human, earth and air are poised at a
point of integration, where they both understand and become
each other.
Her ceramic sculptures were smoke-glazed using the Japanese
Raku technique, where coarse clay is sculpted by hand, fired
in the kiln, then laid in a nest of twigs which ignites on
contact with the glowing newly-fired clay, causing smoke and
ash to become embedded within the body of the sculpture. The
primordial flickers of carbon smudging the surface appealed
greatly to Graves, suggestive simultaneously of life and
death. Often they had the appearance of bone, reflecting a
sense of something unearthed, partially corroded, and
concealing more than they revealed.
Graves was fiercely secretive about firing her work, finding
it an intense, emotional and private process. Her studio
assistants always suspected that the pyre of leaves and
wood-shavings traditionally burnt in Raku was also being
stoked with less conventional combustible materials such as
favourite found objects and personal artefacts, which would
imbue the sculptures with almost talismanic significance.
One of her most recent works, Burial Ground (on show at
Penrith Museum as part of "Stones; Circles; Landscape Art"
until 31 October), is an enigmatic collection of vessels and
effigies suggestive of Bronze Age grave goods. Within the
fabric of one of these ceramic urns, Graves had incorporated
her own father's ashes. Graves held forceful views about the
sanctity of burial sites, and hoped her work would make
viewers question the rights of archaeologists to disturb and
display ritual remains. "It seems that the passing of time
justifies any desecration, any level of insatiable or morbid
curiosity," she wrote:
The very existence of mystery or the unexplained seems
excuse enough to sweep aside all former rites, simply to add
to the list of what is Known or Found. We call these things
found even though they were not lost. Is something
diminished by being in the dark earth or is it diminished by
being removed and exposed?
A humanist, Graves had an intense sense of the sacred, and
this was reflected in commissions such as her 1991 crucifix
for Carver Memorial Church in Windermere, the memorial on
Little Dunn Fell (1994-95), and her relationship with
Welfare State International (producers of the Dead Good
Funerals Book), for whom she created a hand-painted coffin
in 1994.
Graves exhibited steadily across Britain, Japan, Germany and
the United States. She won awards (notably the
Oppenheim-Downs Memorial Award in 2001) and her work entered
many public collections, with purchases made by the Victoria
and Albert Museum, Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, Abbott
Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, and numerous other city art
galleries from Aberdeen to Stoke-on-Trent.
She had a strong following, but perhaps suffered the fate of
many artists who are rooted within one locale, to be
dismissed by the metropolis as a "local" artist. In the
mid-Nineties, Graves moved her studio to the Barbican in
London; but by 2001 she was back on home soil in Cumbria,
and exhibiting regularly with the new Lowood Gallery in
Armathwaite.
Lorna Graves was strongly connected to the land and
landscape of Cumbria, but never belonged to any one place,
shifting and resettling often, between Brampton, Grasmere
and a succession of houses in Hunsonby, close to the stone
circle Long Meg and Her Daughters.
"The modern psyche has been said to suffer from ontological
disorientation or a loss of a sense of origins," she wrote.
"The power and effect of prehistoric monuments is to trigger
memories of belonging." It is this same quality of
groundedness which Graves achieved in her own work -
stirring a sense of permanence, continuity and the
inexplicably familiar.