PHANTASMS & FREQUENCIES

For ‘Phantasms & Frequencies’, Julia Ellen Lancaster is exhibiting an entirely new body of ceramic sculptures. Over recent years, Lancaster has worked across a range of sculptural techniques but always maintaining a consistent focus on clay. For her, clay is a material capable of giving form to qualities more often associated with music, poetry, and dreams. Through intuitive processes, her works emerge as fleeting impressions shaped by landscape, the body, and the sensations of dreamlike states just before waking.

Images appear and dissolve: scarred landscapes, shifting skies, crystallised bodies, and imagined futures marked by transformation.

Clay itself is central to Lancaster’s thinking: a material transformed irreversibly by fire. Her practice is closely tied to labour, reuse, and material change, incorporating reclaimed clays and recycled glazes. In the studio she works among fragments, shards, rubble, dust, rocks, and hundreds of experimental test pieces she reincorporates into larger works. Her process combines physical discipline with a form of material responsiveness in which texture, weight, and chance guide the work.

The ghost of Pandora appears throughout this body of work. In Greek mythology Pandora was given a clay vessel and warned never to open it.

When she did, suffering escaped into the world, leaving only Hope behind. Lancaster’s sculptures echo this tension between containment and release, carrying traces of transformation and helplessness.

Working from her coastal studio has heightened Lancaster’s sensitivity to weather, tides, and cyclical time. These rhythms inform works in which landscape and body become intertwined. Through processes of reuse and care, her ceramic sculptures propose a quieter relationship with materials and the environment, grounded in coexistence rather than extraction.

Phantasms & Frequencies is kindly sponsored by PICOSO Drinks