Weaving her magic

A childhood spent among raspberry bushes sparked Laura Ellen Bacon’s passion for sculpting the massive, organic willow sculptures that now grace some of Britain’s grandest country houses

- Ben Lerwill

AS a young girl in the 1970s, Laura Ellen Bacon grew up on a small fruit farm on a south-facing slope in Derbyshire. Surrounded by raspberries and strawberries, she not only became adept at plucking the fruits from the stems, filling baskets for local orders, with the odd handful snaffled for sustenance, but found herself with mountains of cut fruitcane to play with. The cane proved the perfect material for shaping ever-more-elaborate dens and treehouses, bolstered further by bits of wood procured from her joiner grandfather. Before long, an obsession was born.

‘I was 11 when I asked for a hammer for Christmas,’ she chuckles. ‘I didn’t mean a child’s hammer, I meant a proper one. All I wanted was a bag of nails and a hammer. And I would make these treehouses. The biggest one was spread between five beech and mountain-ash trees, and creating it was the most precious time. I was left to my own devices.’

Today, Mrs Bacon still crafts flowing, large-scale, organic sculptures—by hand rather than hammer and her reputation means that, these days, the results go on show. Her works have been installed everywhere from Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds to the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, London SW3. One of her pieces even inspired the composer Helen Grime to write a three-part movement in its honour, Woven Space, subsequently performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle. That’s some evolution from the raspberry-farm den.