Lesley Hilling

Lesley Hilling explores two themes in her sculptural work - the exterior, architectural layering of buildings and cities, and the interior, more personal home space. The pieces are made entirely from salvaged wood, built up in many layers, much of which can only be seen in glimpses. Some are constructed from old furniture, floorboards and pianos - wooden collages jigsawed and layered with an obsessive joinery. For decades, Lesley has collected the detritus left by previous generations.

She repurposes the discarded wooden debris from demolished buildings and the waste from redevelopments. Salvaged windows, doors, lengths of architrave and timber are broken down into smaller pieces and then reworked into new forms. Her work takes a dimensional form and is painterly as each piece of wood is selected for its colour, texture, and tonal quality. Blending ageing timber with softwood and plywood, she constructs complex, architectural work that is distilled into purely structural forms.

They are close knit but delicate, fragile within a grid like mesh. Interconnected and interrelated, they create wooden networks that, viewed from a distance, look like maps or aerial views of the city. They also suggest the networks and systems around us today: the patterns of settlement and migration, the frameworks that brings us food, water, and heating.

The domestic pieces have an emphasis on people, their memories, and the passage of time. They are built in a similar way to Hilling’s other work but they house tiny artefacts of memory such as a photograph, a shell, a forgotten treasure, things that once had a different life. These found objects and photographs often have magnifying glasses in front of them which distort in the same way that time distorts memories, disorienting and reorienting the viewer as they move around the piece. They say, “We were here, we existed.”

lesleyhilling.co.uk