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About.

(You can download a copy of my artist CV here.)

Lila Wordsworth (b. 1986) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on salvaged and found materials. Local plants and urban & maritime waste streams, including rusted objects, plastic waste and construction rubble all find their way into her studio. She then turns them into pigments, dyes, sculptures, textiles, cyanotype prints and photographs.

Currently, she is focused on exploring stories emerging from her urban and coastal environments 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 city and the sea themselves, as they leave gifts and garbage to tell their tales. At times she transforms the materials extensively, obscuring their original form. Other times, she uses them in their raw state, imbuing them with an organic feel that makes space for imperfections and honours them as part of the process.

She uses personal stories as a starting point to expand into bigger, politically charged questions about environmental unrest and conservation, the nature of identity, bodies in their environment, the boundaries of consciousness of humans and non-humans, connectedness of things, deep time, capitalist grind culture and the edges of birth and death. 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 before dedicating her time to her community and art practices. She was awarded a residency at Xenia Creative Retreat in September 2024. In 2023, she was awarded the Andrew Edney Bursary, enabling Wordsworth to work with Serpentine curator Lucia Pietrouisti. She lives, forages for rubbish and swims in Brighton, UK.

Professional development

  • Peer mentoring with Kayleigh Peters (Feb 2025 - present)

  • Mentoring with ecological public artist Kerry Lemon (Feb 2025 - May 2025)

  • Xenia Creative Retreat artist in residence (September 2024)

  • Mentoring with Lucia Pietrousti, head of ecologies, Serpentine (Summer 2023)

Exhibitions and gallery presence

Press

Professional memberships

ArtCan (2022 - Feb 2025) is a selective collective of national and international artists offering networking and learning opportunities.

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

Salvaged fabric in an indigo vat