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About.

Lila Wordsworth (b. 1986) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on salvaged and found materials such as local plants and urban & maritime waste streams, including rusted objects, plastic waste and construction rubble. She turns them into pigments, dyes, sculptures, textiles, cyanotype prints and photographs. Her work is process driven and expressive in style, embracing a contemporary aesthetic that combines both figurative and abstract elements.

She is currently focused on exploring stories emerging from the urban environment in Brighton and Brighton Beach, as a liminal space where humans, technology and the vastness of the sea meet. The work she is making through this exploration is co-created by the sea and the city themselves, as they leave gifts and garbage to tell their tales.

She uses personal stories as a starting point to expand into bigger questions about environmental unrest and conservation, the nature of identity, bodies in their environment, the boundaries of consciousness of humans and non-humans, connectedness, deep time, capitalist grind culture and the edges of birth and death. Wordsworth draws upon science, literature, politics and the wilderness of dreams to compose her work. At times she transforms the materials extensively, obscuring their original form, but also uses them in their raw state, imbuing them with an organic feel that embraces the joy of the imperfect and the unexpected. Her work sometimes creates an eerie, uncanny feel where the familiar starts to feel strange. Disembodied body parts, floating objects, re-contextualised materials and fragments of debris often find their way into her work and help create a sense of unease that calls our perceptions into question.

Growing up on a farm in France, she was surrounded by the natural and cultivated world, and was particularly marked by the beauty and darkness that she witnessed on a daily basis. The tension between the two is tangible in her work, where she continually questions her place in her environment.

Her artistic influences include, among others, Sarah Lucas, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, surrealism, Gees Bend quilters, Eva Hesse, June Crespo and Eileen Agar.

A self-taught artist, she studied English and American Studies at the University of Sussex and worked as a secondary English teacher and later as an education officer before dedicating her time to her art practice. In 2023, she was awarded the Andrew Edney Bursary, enabling Wordsworth to work with Serpentine curator Lucia Pietrouisti. She lives and swims in Brighton, UK.

Exhibitions and gallery presence

Press

  • Bait/Switch vol.4, no.2

  • Bait/Switch vol.3 no.1

Professional memberships

ArtCan (2022 - present) is a selective collective of national and international artists offering networking and learning opportunities.

Studio Art Quilts Associates (2022 - present) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting quilting as an art form.

Outside in (2022 - present) is a charity championing artists who face significant barriers to entry into the art world.

Kemptown Artists (2023) is a networking hub for local artists. They also produce the map for the Kemptown Open House trail.

Salvaged fabric in an indigo vat