LUCY MCMILLAN

‘FOLDED AIR’

1 - 30 August 2025

ARTOR CONTEMPORARY

12 FITZROY ST, PONSONBY, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU

hello@artor.nz

We are pleased to present Lucy McMillan’s inaugural solo exhibition at Artor Contemporary, on view from 1-30 August 2025.

Folded Air brings together a collection of clay wall hangings and sculptures that began as impossible visual balancing acts. McMillan built these with an empirical approach, with special attention on the clay’s ability to hold tension and silent narrative. McMillan has translated their touchstones of Formalism and Expressionism into the stretchy, complex memory language that is inherent to clay: touch through carving, inlaying, whittling, collaging, twisting clay.

This work draws from traditions of the applied arts and the attention and care McMillan finds in hand-built bas-relief facades, textile, furniture, and ornament design. They borrow elements from the soft geometries of Humanist interior architecture and the compositional play of Constructivist spatial drawing, where gaps and joins remain exposed and where the physicality of making is visible.

McMillan is drawn to things that feel lived in, have a weightiness, or a presence of the past. After firing, pulling out forms from the kiln can feel like unearthing ambiguous artefacts—undated and unfamiliar—and that’s close to where they want this work to sit: not from a specific place, but loaded with intentional non-meaning.

Lucy McMillan Kino, 2025
Stoneware, hand stained concrete. approx. W300 x H300mm

NZD $1,100 incl.GST. Enquire

Lucy McMillan (b. 1981), lives and works in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Lucy McMillan’s multidisciplinary studio is built on the foundation of her sculptural ceramic objects that ride the line between art and design. Her works are both functional and decorative, taking cues from the composite approach of constructivist sculpture and dusty collections found in natural history museum vitrines. Often exploring the form of negative space, they sit somewhere between assemblage and relief playing out her fascination with artefacts and prehistory. In 2020, Lucy made her foray into commercial and residential tile manufacturing and is currently developing a collection of commissioned lighting works, interior fittings and furniture pieces. 

McMillan gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2001.