Legacy Landscape
2019
Drawing - felt tip and ink on acid-free paper
110 x 276.5 x 5cm (framed) | 100 x 266 x 0.2cm (unframed)
Photographs - Nick Ash
Legacy Landscape (2019) marks a decisive shift in Lawley’s practice. Conceived at a large scale, it establishes a psychologically charged terrain in which individual stories exist within wider inherited histories.
Following a year of drawing solitary female figures, this work introduces the figure as a collective presence for the first time. Legacy is understood here as something lived through the body, shaping the present as much as the past. At this point, matrilineal histories become a defining framework through which themes of memory, inheritance, resilience and transformation are developed.
The dense compositions, psychologically charged space and bodily transformation developed here continue to underpin Lawley’s practice, positioning Legacy Landscape as a foundational departure point.
Excerpt from the exhibition text for Seepage From My Primal Fountain (2024)
The genesis of Lawley's present work phase, Legacy Landscape (2019) manifests the liberatory potential of this process of shedding. The large-scale drawing depicts sharp-edged female archetypes isolated in various states of agony and abandon and yet interconnected through shared matrilineal trauma reaching back to the beginnings of time. Their entanglement is reminiscent of a primal dance, in whose ecstatic embrace the confines of corporeal individuality and injury dissolve and a communal subjectivity emerges. - Seepage From My Primal Fountain, 2024, exhibition text, Lisa Deml with Laura Allsop
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