What If The Sea Had Hands?

Lila Wordsworth

Interview by L. Valena
January 23, 2023

All right, let’s get into it. In the five years of Bait/Switch, you are the first person to ever respond to two prompts together. We're in uncharted territory here, but let’s start how we always start. Can you describe the two prompts that you responded to?

I was sent two 2D images. One of them looked like a collage and it had a Scandi vibe, with these organic, kind of Marimekko shapes. It looked like a stencil that had been layered over a collage. I really liked it. It's an aesthetic I'm quite drawn to. And then the other piece was really interesting, quite different. The color palette was actually quite similar. It was a triadic color palette, so there were many blues, yellows, and reds, but using different tones from the other piece. I couldn't work out how they'd made it, but it looked like a print or maybe different layers of prints. There was a degree of repetition, a strong sense of pattern, I felt. There was a woman in the picture. She was on a reddish yellow background, and she looked kind of like a mermaid. She had this undulating hair, and she had some cute little boobies on show. There was a sort of sexiness about her, but she was almost behind bars, behind this mesh. I thought it had some interesting things going on.

How did you approach this?

Well, like I did with the first challenge I did for Bait/Switch, I just spent a long time with the pieces. I just looked and looked and looked and looked and looked. At first, I thought, “These look nothing alike. I don't know what I'm gonna find in here.” But then I made some notes on what I could see in the pieces and some similarities came out. And then I noticed the color scheme and was like, boom, I'm going to go with a sort of triadic color scheme, but in the end I didn't. My final piece is really different from the two pieces, but I think I've got some elements from both.

I've got the mesh from one of the images, which I found on the beach. The whole sculpture is entirely made from beach materials. I've been experimenting with collaborating with the sea, so I wanted to see if I could make something entirely from beach materials. And so the materials are as I found them - the only changes I made was to drill some holes. I've got the mesh from one of the images, which I found on the beach. The metal grill I think was probably from a disposable barbecue. I don't know if you guys have those over in the States. They're fun because you can pick them up in a supermarket and have a barbecue on the beach. You can just be quite impromptu, although they're often hot when people leave them, and people don't dispose of them properly. The grill was no longer flat, it had been sculpted by the sea’s movements so I left it as it was and resisted the urge to tinker. So that’s the part I took from the layered mermaid picture.

Next, I found an object to use that was reminiscent of the Scandi picture, which I think is from a boat and used to tether ropes. It’s got quite an organic shape, a bit like a pair of glasses. I felt that it had similar lines to the Scandi picture but then it also reminded me of the mermaid’s little boobies. So I ended up going really different to how I started out, which I was kind of surprised by, but you’ve just got to go with what's calling to you, I guess.

Absolutely! I think this idea of you collaborating with the sea is so cool. Is that something you've explored in the past?

Well, it's something I'm doing increasingly, so my practice is really moving toward locally foraged materials. And I have been increasingly using sea materials, but I hadn't done it to this extent before. Last time I participated in Bait/Switch, I made a quilt. I remember Cody saying, “And if you do it again, you might try something different.” I was like, “Nah, I'm definitely going to do a quilt,” and then obviously I didn't this time around. In the future, I'd really like to make a quilt entirely from beach materials, but that's going to take a very long time.

It's something I want to explore more of because I'm exploring interconnectedness and consciousness beyond humans. I suppose that's where my practice is going at the moment. There’s so much interesting research going on at the moment around plant and animal and insect consciousness. I think someone is on the verge of proving that spiders can dream during REM sleep.

WHAT?

Yeah, so crazy! I found this out at this conference I went to on Friday. Get this: plants can be anesthetized using vet anesthetics.

[Lu is gobsmacked.]

It's just like, WHAT? So if you sort of dust this mimosa plant with a paintbrush, its leaves constrict because it senses that you've touched it. If you gas it with dog anesthetics, it goes to sleep, and you can rub its leaves again and they're just limp. Then as it wakes up, you start tickling it again and it reacts again. It wakes up!

That is crazy! Does that mean that plants experience pain? That definitely complicates things.

Yeah, like from an ethics standpoint, doesn't it? It throws up some really big questions about how we farm and manage the land and how we can live with mutual respect. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack.

I just heard this podcast the other day about a plant in South America that they found can actually replicate the look of other plants. If you put this plant next to a different plant, its leaves will begin to look like that plant. It camouflages itself. “But wait a second, plants don't have eyes. Wait, do plants have eyes?” It's really weird!

Oh my god, I wonder how it's doing that!

The theory which I think is really cool is that it's actually microbes, that plants have these microbe clouds in the same way that we do. And some of them are actually affecting the genetics of the plant, telling it how it's supposed to look. This particular plant’s microbes can be affected by other plants’ microbe clouds. And okay, that makes sense, I guess. But it's pretty wild.

Wow. I'm going to have to go and research that.

There's so much research being done about this stuff and it’s just totally fascinating. So what you have made is an assemblage piece. Is that how you would describe this?

Yeah, it is my usual style of making, I would say. Even my quilts. my art is “an exercise in plonking.” I don't know if you don't use that word in the States. You just plonk things here and plonk things there and see if it looks nice. And that's very much how I construct my quilts, taking a kind of collage approach. And that just generally works for me. I tried painting for a while, but I just find it so hard. How do you know where to put the thing and how big it's got to be? I like to have the materials in-hand and have a tactile approach, even though I think I'm quite a visual person. I think I still need that conversation between seeing and feeling, so I feel like more sculptural stuff works a bit better for me.

I love that you've given us images of this piece on the beach and then essentially in a gallery. Where does this piece of art belong?

That's such a good question. Obviously, I feel like it belongs at the beach really, because that's where it came from, and displaying that kind of work on the beach does feel like it’s in its place. Making more site-specific stuff would be really interesting. I'd really like to do some wind sculptures on the beach, or stuff that's been made with the waves somehow, and display that on the beach. Maybe take a kind of ephemeral approach,and not be too tied to it lasting. Maybe the record is a film or a photograph, and then you just send it back into the sea. Making art that's got a low environmental footprint is really important to me. I'm always striving to make it as biodegradable, or made from recycled materials, as much as possible. I'm trying not to use any new materials at all really. I do experiment with some kind of new materials sometimes because it's easier to find, but the stuff that I can get off the beach is just incredible. Last time, I went after a storm and I got all these massive bits of wood and cuttlefish bones, which I'm going to try and do cyanotypes on.

Cool!

There are all sorts of materials that you can use if you get a bit creative. There’s just an abundance. And it's free and you're tidying up the beach as you do it, so it’s a win-win. Of course, not everyone is able to go to the beach. I accept that sometimes a gallery is a better fit, but the white box gallery thing… I don't know. They can be nice spaces, but I want my work out in the wild. It's not very realistic, though, so yeah, [put-upon voice] “I'll accept a gallery if I have to.” [both laugh]

That’s really interesting stuff to navigate and I think it's admirable that you keep exploring ways to be more environmentally friendly in your art. That's something that we certainly don't talk about enough.

Yeah, it is limiting and sometimes it's really hard to make something that I think is beautiful. I find that hard because I've got quite defined aesthetics and I like things to look nice. I had to accept with this piece that it might not be as jazzy and visually spectacular as I have an urge to make, but I think that's part of the fun. That's part of the growth. I think having these limits can really help you focus. It just makes me have to work a bit harder, I suppose. I'm excited to see where this approach is going to go, but for the moment, I'm accepting that my art is sometimes a bit ugly.

I don’t know what you're talking about! It's minimal but it's gorgeous.

Thank you. I struggle with minimalism. When other people do it, I'm like, “Oh my God, that looks so amazing!” And when I do it, I'm like, “That's a pile of shit.” I guess that's going to be part of my learning in these explorations. Personal growth.

Well it is gorgeous. So I hope that you feel good about this beautiful piece that you made. Now that you've done this twice, do you have any new advice for other artists approaching this project?

Try not to get too caught up in how you respond to the piece, making sure that it's a really good reflection of the piece. Just try and see it as a jumping-off point. Take a few elements of the piece that speak to you and see where they take you. I actually thought I was going to do something different, something 2D. Then I got out my beach materials and just kind of kept moving things around and playing around and eventually something came together. Keep a loose approach. Approach it as a game, something to play with. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. That's definitely the spirit of the thing for sure.

You guys are very good at making clear that you've got two weeks and you don't have to make anything super amazing. You’ve just got to get going, and that's a really good approach to making art. If you’ve spent a long time away from your art – for some people it's been years – you might feel a little afraid. But the key is just to get to work, isn't it? Just get started and the ideas will start coming. You don't have to have a plan in place. Take that first little step and then usually, from my experience, things will start coming.

You’ve got to open that channel.

And then it just trickles out. And then it flows, if you're lucky!

Call Number: Y96&Y97VA | Y98VA.woWha

Lila Wordsworth is a multidisciplinary artist focused on salvaged and local materials, turning them into sculptures, textiles and cyanotype prints and photographs, living in Brighton, UK. Her work is expressive in style, embracing an abstract contemporary aesthetic. She is currently focused on exploring stories emerging from Brighton Beach, as a liminal space where humans, technology and the vastness of the sea meet.