Lucy Mitchell is an artist who can’t go for a walk without dragging home a tree trunk or a pocketful of pebbles. She long ago observed that simple objects found in nature spark a strong creative impulse in her, and she has been using them in her artwork ever since. Over the years, thousands of these natural artifacts have made their way into her studio.
Since last summer, the sculptures she has been creating – subtle and enigmatic – are bigger than her past works. Tall, slender, and elegant, driftwood mostly, they are completely covered over with the delicately detailed designs familiar to longtime followers of her art.
Lucy, who lives in West Tisbury, first became known some thirty years ago for her intricate drawings of mazes, maps, spirals, and sassafras-leaf motifs. These stood on their own early on, and later served as background panels in framed boxes filled with stones, eggs, sticks, and other small objects that were covered in paper detailed with swirling curves, dots, and imaginary hieroglyphics.
“I started with very small collages, but didn’t start making sculpture until I realized one day that my studio itself was a sculpture, an installation of carefully arranged collections,” Lucy says. “Then the slow evolution the work had been taking had a sudden jolt, the way an event in nature will upset and change the evolutionary process. So I started to put my collections in boxes. Then came collections of invented artifacts mixed in with natural objects. Today the pieces are individual, larger, freestanding, without the glass enclosure.”
The new work Lucy is exhibiting this month at the Nye Gallery in Oak Bluffs features long, heavy pieces of wood, individually displayed upright on sturdy stands. The driftwood sculptures have smoothly rounded, well-worn edges, but a few others – crafted from sawmill or boat-yard castoffs – are sharp and angular. All of them have undergone Lucy’s transformative process: meticulous cleaning and preservation, followed by her methodical application of hand-drawn patterned paper with muted colors, covering every curve, crack, and indent in the wood.
Her fellow artist and longtime friend Peigi Cole-Jolliffe will be showing new paintings of the night sky at the Nye Gallery alongside Lucy’s sculptures. The two friends share an ongoing correspondence about art, frequently exchanging sketches, articles, poetry, and ideas through the mail. Peigi, a former Vineyarder now living in Maine, says she is inspired by Lucy’s artistic vision.
“I am attracted by the intelligence and mystery of her work, by what is revealed and what is hinted at,” she explains. “It’s full of secrets and unspoken messages. I also love the elegance of what she does. Her pieces look natural and effortless, yet there are painstaking hours poured into every one of them.”
After decades of working on a small scale, Lucy says her desire to create bigger pieces evolved naturally.
“I let my work grow of its own accord. Now I’m working on pieces of wood as big as I can handle. I find them on the beach, in the woodpile, at the boat yard,” she says. “I see them first as beautiful pieces of wood, shapes that could stand on their own. They really need no embellishment on my part, but I still love the process of transforming and covering them – I can’t help myself.”
The motivation to take home, to save and preserve those curious odds and ends she finds along the way, is part of an impulse to collect that, Lucy believes, many people share.
“I’ve always thought that everybody has their own personal museum of collected things,” she says, “and I love the way each person focuses in on their own idea of beauty or interest, how things are arranged, labeled or not.”
Her penchant for gathering, organizing, and displaying hundreds of simple found objects reached a high point ten years ago, when she was offered a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland. There, in a show titled Omnium Gatherum, her artwork filled room after room. She covered a long table with assemblages of both decorated and unadorned objects: thin sticks, wooden balls and eggs, bits of quahaug shells, detritus found on her walks along the Island’s sandy shores, and hundreds of smoothly rounded beach pebbles precisely arranged according to size and shape.
Boxed displays and mixed-media assemblages lined the walls. Eight-foot-wide mazes created from beach stones and sand filled a dimly lit room, with her maze drawings spotlighted on a nearby wall. An impossibly long and slender stick, made up of many smaller pieces painted and fitted together, pointed the way down a hall. The exhibit was a heady experience.
“That exhibit spoiled me for gallery showing,” Lucy, whose work has been widely exhibited on-Island and in New York, says with a laugh. “It was so wonderful to have all that space. I could do whatever I wanted, and I did.”
Coming back down to earth might have been a challenge if not for the creative inspiration Lucy felt immediately upon resuming the routine of her Island life.
“The Vineyard is good for artists. It’s a most beautiful place to live and work, especially in the winter when it’s not too crowded,” she says, and rattles off her most-loved walking spots on the Island: Cedar Tree Neck in West Tisbury, and Great Rock Bight and Fulling Mill Brook in Chilmark. “Cedar Tree Neck is really my favorite place. I grew up near there, so I’ve been tramping through those woods and shoreline for a long time. Great Rock Bight has that same north-shore quality of woodsy paths leading to lovely sparkling water, rocks, and beach. I love the great ponds, the south shore, where some remarkable driftwood has been gleaned.”
Lucy was born into an artistic family that divided its time between Pennsylvania and Martha’s Vineyard. Her mother’s family had an old summer place nestled in a hollow between Indian Hill and Cedar Tree Neck, along the north shore in West Tisbury. Lucy was in second grade when her family moved to the Island to live full time, but even then, they moved back and forth according to the seasons: Summers were spent at the West Tisbury house; during the winters, the Mitchells lived in Edgartown, where her father’s family had always summered. However, the three Mitchell sisters – Lucy, Julia, and Anna, all artists now – loved the house in the woods best.
“We rambled all over the place with our cousins who lived nearby. We followed the paths through the woods, to the water, along the north shore,” Lucy says. “We built huts and sometimes slept out.”
Her sister, the tapestry weaver Julia Mitchell, lives in the now-winterized family summer house. Her work embraces nature too, and she remembers their youth spent in those woods as having a significant effect on the sisters’ artistic growth.
“Our freedom as children to explore our natural surroundings at Indian Hill was influential, as was the assumption among our family that art is as worthy a pursuit as any other,” Julia recalls. “And it was obvious from the time we were children that Lucy experienced the world as an artist.”
Lucy first began using elements of nature in her artwork during her years studying at Dartington College of Art, located near the Devon moors in southwest England.
“When I landed next to Dartmoor, at seventeen, it felt comfortably like Chilmark, and I took to the place immediately,” she says. “One day, while on an expedition to an estuary nearby, I collected some leaves, brought them back to my room, and used them in a collage. That was the beginning – I’ve used found materials ever since.”
She spent much time working alongside one of her teachers in particular, a noted textile artist named Susan Bosence.
“Susan was a marvelous teacher and, like the other teachers at Dartington, she had a way of providing materials, examples, techniques without seeming to be didactic,” Lucy explains. “Students were encouraged to follow their own instincts. She kept her own work very much in the background, but her sensibility was strong and apparent. She gently led the way.”
In her work in and out of the classroom, Lucy collected plants, made dye vats, carved linoleum blocks, and learned to use wax and delicate ties and stitching for resist dyeing. “I think those natural dye colors and repetitive textile patterns were what influenced my later work the most,” she notes.
Several other artists from the British Isles have inspired her. The best known of these is the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who creates and photographs iconic and often ephemeral works of art using elements of nature – stone, ice, leaves, and pollen, among others – primarily in their own environments.
“I think he’s opened people’s eyes to a particular way of looking at nature in art,” Lucy says of the sculptor, whose work has been widely published. “His work is really about the process of making and experiencing.”
She especially admires two British artists – Richard Long and Hamish Fulton – who make use of long walks through nature as the starting point (and sometimes the final product itself) in their artwork. Long uses photography, text, and maps to depict the landscape he has walked. Fulton makes sculpture, images, and text pieces that detail his walks. Their conceptual vision of walking-as-art appeals to Lucy, an avid walker herself.
“By calling a walk a work of art, Long and Fulton are expanding and redefining the idea of what constitutes sculpture,” she explains. “I particularly like the idea of being in nature and marking the experience in various ways – using words, maps, stones, photos, etcetera – recording the pathways and the time spent on them.”
She adds, “I walk because I like to be able to observe things closely.”
And because Lucy is looking for them, she often comes across interesting relics. She collects wherever she wanders – out back in her garden, along the beach, through the woods. Sometimes a particularly hefty specimen will require assistance. Then she and her husband, painter Rez Williams, will carry it out together and cart it home in his pickup truck. On occasion her son, Will Donnelly, a composer now living in New York, is drafted to help lug some of the larger pieces up the narrow stairway to her work space.
Her studio, a converted loft in the barn behind their West Tisbury house, resembles a large-scale cabinet of wonders assembled by a nineteenth-century seaside naturalist. Lining the long, low walls under the eaves, painted wooden shelves are filled with thousands of neatly arranged artifacts.
Along the south side, sticks, stones, shells, and scraps of wood in all shapes and sizes are stacked end to end, each covered with her intricate, hand-drawn designs. Along the north wall, the shelves are filled with such flotsam and jetsam as abandoned nests, bits of broken pottery, and other raw materials. Tiny, red-bordered labels catalogue the contents of the rows of white boxes, but more often than not, the collections overflow the boxes and the shelves and take over the floor as well. Finished pieces fill another wall of shelves near a long window overlooking Lucy’s vegetable garden, and a pasture beyond.
Lucy often finds herself working alone in the studio for long spells, sometimes nine or ten hours at a stretch. She has no set rules about her work, but tends to focus on one piece until it’s finished. Her process is labor-intensive, requiring a steady hand and endless patience. Reading glasses have become an essential tool.
“Basically, when I am working, it is either a lot of thinking out ideas and making drawings and diagrams and writing notes, or the time-consuming practice of preparing the wood, drawing and painting and gluing,” Lucy explains. “I like to listen to music – my favorite composers, Morton Feldman, Bach, are dealing with complicated patterns in their work. I relate to that.
“The covering of the object does take time,” she continues. “I don’t think anyone would be as mad, to try to do what I do. It’s such a long, glacial process, like lichen growing. I have the patience for it. For now, anyway.”
The artifacts Lucy accumulates find a comfortable home in her studio, and later, perhaps, in her sculptures or drawings or assemblages. She derives great personal satisfaction from her work, but she leaves any deeper meaning up to the observer.
“My work is a distillation of what I see and experience: animal tracks, lichens, rotting wood, watery places, stones, and sand, patterns of ice and drizzle and light,” she says. “It’s really about intellectual curiosity, in many ways, but I like it to be open to interpretation. If you see the pattern, I want it to be minimal – sleek and simple and subtle. Ultimately it can be whatever you want it to be: an archeological find, something mysterious washed up on the beach, a lost relic, a sculpture.”
