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.”
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.
The Greendale Oak serves as a metaphor for the dangers of AI – just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
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.