Julia Ellen Lancaster

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a series of works acting as guides for, or protagonists in, other-worldly explorations yet to be made - journeys to impossible places that defy human intrusion. Of the 6,370km distance to the centre of the earth the furthest ever drilled is around 12km, at only 8.5km the temperature of 180°C makes it unfeasible to go further. Far more so than the remote reaches of outer space, what is known of what lies far beneath us is only formed indirectly from data analysis, supposition and speculation.

 Lancaster uses wild clay and rocks, some spanning millions of years of the rock cycle, excavated from across the UK and fired to extreme heat to create sculptures investigating the relationships between the landscape and the human body, as connected and interchangeable.

 Over 1,300 million years ago, long before trees overtook the land some 700 million years ago, the earth was covered by giant mushrooms – like those that Jules Verne’s Professor Lindenbrock discovered in his fictional account of the centre of the earth. These represented the beginnings of the mycelium network, a threadlike vegetative fungus. Transferring the right nutrients to the right plants and existing over much of the earth it acts as a superhighway of vital information forming an inter-connective tissue of the natural world.

 Like the tiny differences in DNA that distinguish us from each other (only a few tiny changes in our DNA structure set us apart, giving us our variations in eye, skin, and hair color) we are equally closely related to these fungi. Lancaster’s works imagine a future in which human detritus (waste, bodies and possessions) is absorbed by this mycelium network and turned into extraordinary solidified geological formations that then return to the core earth once again.

 Lancaster works with clay and ceramics to mimic and suggest scientific, geological and sociological histories. Her interests lie in the haptic experience of materials and the innate qualities that emerge in the process of working with them.

 Clay brings with it the offer of pleasure in simple manipulation, in the feel of it. With the potential to overcome the inhibitions of other forms of making, and through intuitive manual actions like pinching, stretching, scrapping and smoothing, something fundamental is at work that implies a deep commonality. Lancaster’s work revels in this approach to the material and forges connections and associations to link the present to the distant past, the here to the extreme elsewhere and the ‘me’ to everything else.

Julia Ellen Lancaster has exhibited in the UK and Japan and for 2020 & 2021 was selected for the Leach 100 Artist Centenary celebrations of Leach Pottery, taking up one of the first residencies in the oldest artist’s studio in the UK, Anchor Studio, originally home of the Newlyn Art School. Recent exhibitions include Containers of Meaning, Jupitor Gallery, Newlyn 2022; Resettling, Anchor Studio & Newlyn Art Gallery 2021; Souvenir, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, 2021; The Listening Project, Folkestone Fringe as part of the Folkestone Biennial, 2021; Lost & Found, Poplar Union Arts Centre, 2021; and works held in private collections.

https://www.juliaellenlancaster.com/

In Conversation Dr Georgia Haseldine & Julia Ellen Lancaster https://youtu.be/OgiePl2NTSs

Dr Georgia Haseldine is Curator of the V&A East Storehouse (opening 2024), a radically reinvented collections store that will offer visitors unprecedented access to the V&A’s collection of art, design and performance. She led The Question of Clay research project with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates which included the setting up of a temporary brickworks and performance space in east London and instigating a community-led research and making project in Stoke-on-Trent reimagining Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion. 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 works with clay and collected materials, exposing them to heat to alter their make up and structure, and as a tool to suggest and explore scientific, geological and sociological histories. Her current, solo, show 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ at m2 Gallery, London, runs to 20 November 2022.