In Good Company is a celebration of creativity and female friendship from sculptors Lucille Lewin and Nicole Farhi.
These names may be familiar from fashion – Lucille founded the brand Whistles whilst Nicole was Head Designer at French Connection and founder of the eponymous Nicole Farhi label. When each of these women chose to leave their long, successful careers in fashion, they both then chose to become full-time sculptors. The exhibition has been organised in association with Selina Skipwith, an independent art advisor and curator.
This exhibition is from the In Good Company series, a project born from the Coronavirus pandemic, which encouraged friends Nicole, Lucille, and Selina to come together and mount their own exhibitions. Selina Skipwith says “In Good Company is a very special exhibition as it shows the work of two amazing women who have both forged new successful careers as sculptors following their previous successes in the fashion world. Lucille and Nicole are an inspiration to women of all ages thinking about starting new careers, not necessarily in the arts, whatever stage they are in life.”
Nicole Farhi’s Heads includes over 100 hand painted miniature busts which have been made over a 5-year period. These figures include a series of 20th century novelists and playwrights, leading voices in 20th century female liberation, and busts of those pioneers that have shaped human history for the better.
“To gain admission to the gallery, I decided you had to have had a radical effect on human history, either by your example, your thinking or by your actions. That effect had to be for the good.
That means some of my pioneers are human activists, Rosa Parks for instance who really did change America. Some are musicians, some artists, philosophers, film makers and great exemplary sports figures who made as much impact by their character as by their technique.
Over the years I have sculpted a multitude of portraits and I enjoy finding ways through the modelling in clay and now by painting them, to reveal the character, the presence of the sitter, their energy, their humanity.”
Nicole Farhi
In Lucille Lewin’s exhibition Second Nature, her organic sculptural pieces explore the collision between nature and humanity and its potentially disastrous impact. The work in part has been made in response to her first visit to the historic Welbeck estate in 2022, and learning about The 5th Duke of Portland, his construction of complex underground rooms and tunnels and the Greendale Oak.
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Second Nature follows on from two earlier bodies of Lewin’s work Alchemical Bodies and The Secret Life of a Pea: Post Apocalyptic Regeneration which was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“My work has its roots in the 18th century, beginning at the origins of European experiments with porcelain, and the alchemists who were incarcerated to invent it. My prompt came from a spice dish made in 1730, in the V & A. Researching this period introduced me to the culture and politics of the age of Enlightenment and I was struck by the similarities between that age and this, of conflict chaos and political uncertainty, but huge advances in science and technology and culture”
Lucille Lewin
