LUCY MCMILLAN

‘FOLDED AIR’

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.