Artist Focus - Lucy Sugden

Lucy Sugden

One of our featured artists this month is Lucy Sugden. You can visit Lucy's Feature window at the Wynd Gallery from August 3 -16 and find out more about Lucy and her work below.

The Wynd Gallery is a co-operative art gallery run by local artists.

The gallery offers an ever-changing exhibition of contemporary prints, paintings, sculpture, jewellery, photography, ceramics and textiles.

The gallery promotes the Arts in Letchworth Garden City and provides an exciting venue suitable for artists working across a range of contemporary visual arts media.

Throughout the year our artists will share their work through our feature window programme You are our current featured artist at the Wynd gallery, with our featured artist window. Please tell us about what we can expect to see when we visit the gallery? A display of my woven fishing line and meadow florals, along with a few of my tapestries focusing on my love for and the importance of moths and butterflies, including a tapestry that has just returned from a juried touring exhibition. Can you tell us a little about your journey into art? I’ve been creating for as long as I can remember. At the age of four, my mum set me up with my own crafting table, and I’ve creating ever since. I never wanted to do anything else and went to art college after my GCSEs, followed by a degree in constructed textiles, which is where I trained in woven tapestry.

What materials or techniques do you most enjoy working with? Anything involving woven tapestry, but I really enjoy the more experimental, multi warp, three-dimensional pulled warped processes. I don’t think there are enough hours in a lifetime to fully explore and master everything woven tapestry has to offer. The process is highly mediative, absorbing, simple yet complex, and at times quite beautifully mind-boggling. My favourite fibre to work with is old fishing line.

What’s one tool you couldn’t live without? My large scaffolding loom, which I’ve had since I graduated. All my tapestries are woven on it. Where do you draw inspiration from? Nature, people, emotions, or something else? Local ecology and garden life, especially the importance of understanding and looking after what we have on our doorstep. I like to quietly share my admiration for it, the calming tranquillity it brings me, and the importance to the bigger picture of life. Creating with waste fibres is my other inspiration, which often has a direct effect on the size and design of a piece. I love the challenge of it, and I find it reinforces how precious resources are. I don’t want to take from the environment we have already depleted when there is an abundance of usable waste.

What projects or ideas are you excited to explore next? Taking time to continue to develop the three-dimensional ideas I have been sampling and exploring over the last few years. What’s one surprising fact about you that people might not expect? I used to be the arts education manager at what is now the Broadway Gallery when it was first starting out in the late 1990s, a role I held for six years after going in to hire a room to run workshops just after graduating. I developed the first children and adult education programs, working in the community as well as with local schools and the college. I still love sharing my skills and run courses and workshops locally, alongside delivering talks and workshops nationally. Do you have a ritual or routine that helps you get into a creative mindset? No, I can tick an idea over in the back of my head for years without much thought, and then, when least expected, the idea pulls itself together. That’s the point hyper-focus sets in, and I’ll be lost in the studio and at the loom. Coffee, tea, or something else while you create? I’m quite enjoying teas from my garden this year. Goosegrass tea earlier in the year was amazingly delicious! What advice would you give someone who wants to start exploring craft or art themselves? Play, explore, enjoy, and don’t take it too seriously, just do it! The more you create, the more the ideas flow and the techniques build.