Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Lola Pilkington
My practise is a personal archiving, an excavation of my past and an enquiry into what is important with respect to the communal nature of being, responding to embodiments of togetherness, collective understandings, and expressions of intimacy. My work is centred around a distribution and redistribution of care and nurture.
Every element of my practice is an expression of care. I work in many fragments, interconnected by the narrative I have found them to share. They echo one another to create a murmuration: a whole defined by its parts. Through making I process experience, physically responding to my internal dialogue. I retrace and remake the same image, drawing it repetitively, nurturing it as an immediate visual language. My painting process involves manipulation to the surface, layering and drawing back; mimicking a conversation with time. I paint in layers of palimpsest, a gradual build-up representing moments in time and illustrations of attention. The craft of ceramics is a meticulous and lengthy process of affection, requiring fostering and complete attentiveness. There is a mutuality of care, the more I look after it, the more likely it is to agree with me.
Like a magpie, I am an eclectic gatherer. I collect and treasure traces of love that live on as symbols of intimacy somewhat forgotten in the fast pace of life, reimagining them as the surrounding songs that transcend time.