WELBECK.- Using silver birch gathered from around the vast Welbeck estate in Sherwood Forest and willow from Somerset, artist Laura Ellen Bacon is has created a huge, new, ‘human-scale’ sculpture to twine around the ground floor at The Harley Gallery.

Opened on 28 July and running till 7 October, ‘LAID’ is abstract in design although the sculpture is loosely inspired by hedge laying and the complex internal spaces of a hedge. Its monumental, site-specific scale allows visitors to enter the sculpture and wander within its nest-like intimacy for an immersive experience that displays the intricacy of Bacon’s work.

Using many thousands of branches, the entire installation has been made by hand using natural materials. Bacon and a small team of helpers knotted, weaved, twisted and plaited the birch and willow over hundreds of hours to create a form at once strange and familiar, straddling the natural world and the man-made.

Laura Ellen Bacon: “I’m fascinated by enclosures, including hedges and the ancient craft of hedgelaying . It’s the life-seeking sap that inspires me most, how the hedge responds to the skilfully wielded, fierce blow of the billhook - and flourishes as a result.”

LAID is Laura Ellen Bacon’s largest ‘woven space’ in a gallery setting for nearly four years. It continues her work in making raw materials into large-scale artworks, in both interior and landscape settings. She works with predominately natural materials and her bare hands, her works embrace, surround or engulf architectural and natural structures and have inspired artists working in other mediums.

Composer Helen Grime was commissioned by the Barbican to compose a new piece for the London Symphony Orchestra which was conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Called ‘Woven Space’ it took its name and inspiration from a work by Bacon that was installed in the famous garden at nearby Chatsworth.

In 2017 Bacon was shortlisted for the BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize. Her work has been commissioned by Chatsworth House Trust and the Holburne Museum, Bath. She has had exhibitions at Ruthin Craft Centre and Roche Court.

British Sculptor, Laura Ellen Bacon (born 1976) works raw materials into large-scale or ‘human-scale’ artworks, in both interior and landscape settings.

Working with predominately natural materials and her bare hands, her works embrace, surround or engulf architectural and natural structures.

Her work has been described as ‘startling but beckoning’; ‘monumental yet intimate’; ‘frenzied yet calm’. Laura’s particular use of materials emerges from a compulsive desire to work them into a formed space of some kind, using a language of materials that seems strangely familiar to the natural world.