Untethered - West Yorkshire Print Workshop

Untethered

Lucy May Schofield, winner of the 2020 Flourish Award, presents new work from her expansive practice. 

5th April – 14th June 2025
Open: Thursday, Friday and Saturday
10.30am – 3.30pm

This solo exhibition by artist Lucy May Schofield brings together a selection of works on paper and textiles presented alongside new sculptural pieces. The show centres around her relationship to light and time, showcasing the performative prints she creates each solstice and equinox within the vast Northumberland landscape. Over the past decade she has explored a ritualistic connection to the seasons, the sun and moon through expanded printmaking.

Lucy invites visitors to the show to contemplate the passage of a year. As meditations on the colour blue, each work is a reflection of the light travelling to us from the sun, over the four corners of the year. Living under a classified dark sky, the stars and planets have become her constant companions and where she looks for perspective and motivation. Untethered is a love letter to time, a journey into her understanding of the human experience of living with, of and as nature.

Born in rural Lincolnshire, she studied book arts in London, later moving to Japan to study printmaking, she now lives and works in Northumberland. After twenty years of city living, a year spent as artist-in-residence in the remote Northumberland National Park connected her back to a life in rhythm and ritual with the seasons.

Lucy finds the landscape to be a portal to a deeper understanding of impermanence, mortality, and deep time. Treating the moorland as her atelier, she initiates a dialogue between place and presence. Her works are delicate yet deliberate, a lens held towards the imperceptible changes that light and time bring. They often whisper to the sky or sit lightly on earth, each work rooted in purpose and intention. It’s vital they make minimal material impact or alter the ecological balance within nature. Whether it’s the act of hand making hundreds of small sheets of paper to capture the light of the shortest day of the year, or hand-stitching panels of indigo dyed cloth to mark the vernal equinox; by listening and aligning, she creates.

Her first collaboration with this landscape was Awake (2017), a performance in which she slept on a horsehair mattress on the moors from dawn till dusk upon a silk sheet coated with light-sensitive emulsion. The blue print captured the memory of the sun’s passage on the first day of spring, embodying the movement of twelve daylight hours spent in a half-sleep-half-awake state complete with the sweat and tear stains of fever-dreams and grief. In this piece she felt, for the first time, the tangible and intimate connection the earth has to the sun and moon.

In the time since she has explored the notion of place through daily cyclical walks in the surrounding fells, gathering inspiration across the changing seasons. She makes, unmakes and remakes. Motifs re-emerge throughout her practice, inviting the viewer to reflect on their own relationship to nature; from lunar charts contemplating the reality of a year in time, to ikebana-like assemblages of fallen branches, sandstone, paper and rocks.

Ultimately Untethered is where sensitivity to materials and profound meaning meet. As offerings to the seasons, we are encouraged to slowly complete these altars to nature with our own stories and experiences of our connection to sacred places.

This exhibition is supported by: Peoples Postcode Lottery & Arts Council England