From June 28, 2025 – October 12, 2026, the Clark Art Institute presents 'Ground/work 2025', an outdoor exhibition themed around global craft practices, featuring Hignell Gallery artist Laura Ellen Bacon. For the exhibtion, the Clark Art Institute has commissioned Gathering My Thoughts a new large-scale sculpture by artist Hugh Hayden. Crafted from cedar lumber and hemlock trees uniquely milled to preserve protruding branches, the work takes the shape of an enormous ribcage, evoking the remains of a massive, mysterious creature.
'For “Gathering My Thoughts,” Bacon wove thin strands of willow together, building up to a monumental shape — a mysterious, wavy growth in the forest that evokes the primitive instinct to use plants and branches to build enclosures. And if it looks like an enormous animal nest, that’s par for the Clark show, “Ground/work 2025,” where six outdoor commissions will remain on view for more than a year (until October 2026)...One time, a bear came within about 30 feet of her... “I was down on my knees weaving away, absorbed in what I was doing, and it was just watching me,” she said. “I kept my distance by moving up the path a little bit. Then it went all around the work. It climbed on there and gave it a really good sniff.”
Ted Loos, The New York Times, 24 July 2025.
Laura Ellen Bacon said ‘The work is made quite gently really, stick by stick, but it gains weight all the time. I’m very interested in snowdrifts for example or sand dunes they are sort of shaped with the elements as well, that gradual layering and weight and accumulation, that’s part of the work. I think about muscularity a lot, I I like things to feel like there’s muscle fibres in there , and I like the fact that the natural materials I use there are literal fibres in there which provide the strength for the form.'
Curator of 'Ground/work 2025' Glenn Adamson explains 'For this project, Bacon decided to make a distinct separate layer each day, the resulting sculpture is made up of a month worth of layers representing a month worth of labour. Willow has been Bacon’s primary medium for almost 25 years now and in that time she has developed a complex personal vocabulary devising techniques as she went along. In this sense she is a self-taught artist and a tremendously sophisticated one. Look closely at the articulate surfaces of her works and you will see intricate patterns beyond counting as varied as a painters brushstrokes.’
