Laura Youngson Coll on vellum.

Laura Youngson Coll is an artist and sculptor based in London. In this episode we talk about her relationship with vellum. Historically the calf’s, or goat’s skin, has been used to write on. The Magna Carta, for example, was inscribed on it as, for centuries, were the laws of this land. However, Youngson Coll, who has featured in Jerwood Makers Open and was shortlisted for the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize in 2017, manipulates the material to create extraordinarily intricate art works.

Her pieces have been inspired by lichen and the 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel. However, her most poignant work came in response to the death of her partner Richard from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. 

She discusses her background; coming into contact with vellum for the first time; how it changed her art; and why the material allowed her to make sense of tragedy. A little like her sculptures, it’s delicate, poignant, emotional and moving.

You can learn more about Laura and her work here: laurayoungsoncoll.co.uk

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Material Matters with me, Grant Gibson. As regular listeners are almost certainly aware, the idea behind the show is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist, or architect about a material with which they're intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. Currently, I find myself in a bookbinder studio in Crystal Palace, which is home to Laura Youngsson Cole. Yet rather than books, the artist creates extraordinarily intricate sculptures made from leather, but also vellum, a carves or goat skin that historically has been used to write on. The Magna Carta, for example, was inscribed on vellum, as for centuries were the laws of this land. However, in Laura's hand, the material is transformed. Inspired by nature and science, her works frequently mix fact with fiction and manage to be at once beautiful and disconcerting. They are, in my view, quite brilliant. And seemingly I'm not alone. Laura won the Perio Jouet Art Salon Prize in 2014, while in 2017 she exhibited at the prestigious Joewood Makers Open and was shortlisted for the Woman's Hour Craft Prize. Laura, thank you very much for doing this.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Did I get that all right?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yes, yes, that's all correct.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Good, good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Even the Youngstone Coal was pronounced properly.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I'm glad you I mean in the first instance, can we talk a little bit about the space we're inhabiting? Yes. Um because it's a bookbinder's. We're in the kind of corner of this huge space. I mean, what goes on here and and what do you do here?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Okay, so um we do one-off um bookbinding projects, um, but we also do a lot of furniture and interiors. Um, so we we make a lot of samples of what you can do with vellum or leather if you're covering furniture, or um so we we make effects which we give to the designers, and then they um say, Oh, we would like this furniture covered in this, or can you adapt this a bit? Or um, so it can be quite a creative process. Um, that's sort of my day job. Um, so that's what's surrounding us at the moment, is that all happens in this studio, and I'm really lucky to rent a space in the corner, which um because all my work's fairly small scale, um, I can expand into the rest of the room sometimes because my colleagues are very nice. Um, but um yeah, I work on a desk in the corner, and it's really good for me to be able to um move between the two because the the furniture work sort of sustains me. Unfortunately, I can't make an entire living out of my own work at the moment. Um, maybe one day, we never know. But um, yeah, it's good to be able to move between the two, and that gives me the opportunity to work on my own work and also do this freelance work and make some money.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Because you trained as a fine artist and a sculptor initially at Duncan of Jordanston, uh, before going on to the Royal College. So, how do you end up working in a bookbinder's?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Completely by chance. So I think it was a colleague at a cafe I was working at when I was doing my MA just as part-time work, and um she one day said, Oh, you know, you're a sculptor. Um, would you like some pairing work? Because at the time we were doing a lot of um huge panels, um, I think it was for a yacht, and there was a lot of very sort of intricate little bits on it, and they all needed pairing. Pairing, pairing was what? Pairing was yeah, okay. Um so pairing is um we do it with a surgical scalpel, we're traditionally done with a pairing knife, um, and it's just thinning down the edge of the leather or the vellum until it's way for way for thin. And it's traditionally used to make seamless joins. So if you think about running your finger over a blunt edge, you know, you would get that blunt edge and you would feel that blunt edge and it would be vulnerable to lifting. But the paired edge is thinned down to such sort of microscopic um thinness that uh you can join, you can put the two paired joins together and create a sort of it, it does um it creates a visual boundary, but it but um uh a physical sort of flatness.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yeah, yeah. So I disturbed your flow. You're in a cafe, somebody says they need someone to pair things.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

So um, so sh yeah, this woman did it um part-time for Gavin, who um owns Rooks Books that we're currently in. Um and so I said, yeah. I mean, you know, I wasn't that happy waitressing. So, you know, some some some making to do as paid work was great. Um so she started to teach me that. Um I think before maybe no, I think maybe we approached Gavin, he said, Yeah, well, you know, if you want to try, and so she started to teach me. I think the first time she tried to teach me, I stabbed her with a scroll. So, you know, it wasn't she let you back in. Yeah, she's still she was still nice enough to we could continue. Um and from there, um I mean pairing is extraordinary, especially with vellum, because it's such a fine material. And I just remember stuff I mean, leather is a bit easier, it's a bit more malleable and a bit more flexible. Um, but vellum, yeah, it's it's so it's it's quite um, it's almost as rigid as paper. So you so you're trying to pair down this extremely like quite rigid surface, so it's very easy to get nicks in it. You do it on glass, so there's no resistance to the blade. But yeah, at first you're just you're taking chunks out of it, basically.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Is that expensive? Presumably it's not ideal.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Well, it's not ideal. Luckily, there's lots of scraps here to practice on. But yeah, on the actual pieces, if you were doing that a lot, then you wouldn't be able to use them. And you know, obviously, yeah, vellum is um the vellum that we use is a goat skin. Um, it's very fine. The skins are quite small, um probably I don't know, half a meter squared in a skin. And they're about £100-150 each. So it's not a cheap material. Yeah, you don't want to nick that. So you didn't want to really mess up, yeah. Um it's one of those things that you just it's just laborious sort of practice, you know, which I find quite um meditative actually. I quite enjoy that sometimes, just having that sort of mindless making.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Um so you were you're at the Royal College of Art on the fine art sculpture course, but you were working here where we are, rook's books, pairing vellum, not licking it.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Not nicking it. And then um yeah, and Gavin offered me other work on the back of that, so I started sticking the vellum and kind of applying it, and yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

And then there was there was a moment where you suddenly decided actually this material is the material I want to use in my work.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah, that came much, much later because um my my dig my sculpture degree up in Dundee was fantastic in the the um fourth year there, especially. We just had so much space up there, and there's actually a lot going up there. You know, I had um Kathy Wilkes was one of my tutors, you know, who was nominated for the Turner Prize a couple years ago, so and Graham Fagan and you know loads of really good artists from Glasgow, and um we were in this um I think it was an old factory or warehouse called Heathfield, and it had 24-hour access, so it's just a code on the door. And I think my studio was probably about the half of this space in the fourth year. Oh, this is a big space. Um, I remember building a cave in it. So it was a cave in my studio.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

What did your fellow students make of that?

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Well, it was my space, it was all your space. It was all my space. Okay. So yeah, I was it was so it was just amazing, you know. So yeah, my in my fourth year the whole thing came together really well. My degree show went really well. But I think I got quite a shock when I came down here. That was um I initially moved down because my partner was starting his MA and I so I was a year in London just trying to find my feet and earn money and um sort of reeling at the expense of and loneliness at first, I think. Um and uh so I started my MA the year after. And I think I was um I was quite young. I mean maybe I should have waited a bit. Um I don't I don't kind of regret anything because you know it's just it's life, isn't it? But um and things you know, things uh can happen um unexpectedly, and you know, that that work can work out really well. So but um yeah, no, I think I was a bit intimidated actually.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Well it's interesting you say that because um we had Beth and Laura Wood in the uh in the series earlier, and she was saying something quite similar. The first year in particular, she she found utterly terrifying, seemingly.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

I mean, everyone's really, really good. And you're you're uh constantly told, you know, this is the best institution in the country, uh kind of I I do remember that speech at the beginning and thinking, we haven't quite made it yet. You know, it's not a certainty that, you know, just because you got on this, I mean obviously it's an amazing opportunity, but um so after my after my MA, I was getting shows and stuff and doing so that I don't think the work went so well on, or I don't think I utilized it so well just because I was a bit because what kind of things were you making?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

That they were they were quite they're based on nature, weren't they? Because you your work is still about nature, but even then it wasn't.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, yeah. So I was making a lot of kind of I used to call them sort of dysfunctional ecosystems, so it was so um I was making a lot of skeletal creatures, which were sort of indefinable. Um and they were um I I made a lot of creatures that could they were sort of bipedal, so they could have been birds, but um they had sort of slightly uh human element to them. Um I made them in I was I was thinking about this earlier actually in relation to material because um I reread an essay that Alistair Robinson wrote because I had a show at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art. I think that was just after my um I was at the Royal College. Obviously, I wasn't using leather or vellum or at that point, um, but he was writing about the surface of these skeletons, and he was saying, you know, it's it was just skull pay which I'd sort of painted and glossed, and but he was saying how you know they were sort of um viscous and black and kind of um really weird surfaces which threw you because um you know bones are meant to be white. And then he was saying the same things about um I made a lot of plant species which I made up from different bits of plants, and um, he was saying, you know, they're very waxy and artificial, and and I was sort of thinking about the material link with that, although I was using a lot of different materials then, and my work wasn't so based on materiality, it was still very intricate, and there was definitely um those qualities that materials can bring were very important to the work, as kind of as and it's sort of a link that I, you know, obviously that has become more apparent than my current work, but um where the interest in nature, where did that come from? So um so my mum was an environmental campaigner from the 70s, or you know, um she set up one of the first sort of ecological cooperative shops way before it was mainstream, they're called Earthcare. She she was um environmental educator, and and my dad um just he spends quite a lot of time in um near Snowdia in Wales. His friends have a house there, and it's just surrounded, it's in the valley surrounded by mountains, and he just he's been writing a nature diary of the place for about the last 10 years, and he he spends a lot of time there on his own. So he's an archaeologist. He's an archaeologist, yeah. So yeah, you you call him up when he's been there for a while, and he starts talking about the kind of the goats and the ravens, and the and you're like, okay, Dad, you've you think you need to get back to civilization for a bit because you're but yeah, no, no, it's it's amazing, and he just has this amazing connection with and so they've always taken me walking and you know out into the into the wilds and sort of taught me the difference between the wild and the country, the cultivated countryside, and the kind of but I think there was always an edge to it because um I was aware of my mum's environmental campaigning and very aware of that aspect of it and our our um impact on that world and our our kind of um how we sort of see ourselves as so separate from it. There's that sort of slightly uh dark side to it as well, because you know it's some of it's very destructive and kind of and and I think yeah, I think I was always aware of of that kind of, and that comes out in some of my work as kind of this sort of um the artifice of our mimicry of nature, and you know so were you making as a child? Uh I have a thing that my dad kept, and it's like a it's a room um and it's probably uh four centimetres wide by about two centimetres, and it's um yeah, it's a tiny little room. I've made it all out of paper, and it's a sofa and a shelf with a plant on it. It's absolutely minuscule, and I've just made this whole room out of paper and kind of but I also remember um sort of really formative um memory is um my mum took me to Shetland when I was about I think I was about uh six, and I went to school there for a couple of months. She was on an archaeological dig up there, so I had to go to, you know, it was in term time. So I was absolutely fascinated with I mean the amazing environment to be in, but I was absolutely fascinated with the um the ziploc bags that they put the archaeological specimens in. And I remember um I had this series of Ziploc bags filled with water, and then I I completely destroyed all my felt-it pens by colouring the water with them. So I had these rainbow bags, and then I found uh a cowburn. I was really obviously into rainbows, and I painted rainbow and crabs, white crabs that have been bleached out by paint. So yeah, it was kind of uh some interesting uh making going on.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

But it's quite interesting because there are some kind of fascinating contradictions. You'll see fascinated by nature, and we've talked about your background kind of in the wild, in nature, but but this is quite an urban environment you work in.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

So the the desire to stay in London?

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Yeah, yeah. Um it it's it's bizarre. I never thought I'd be here for what 18 years now. And I've built my life here, and um yeah, I was possibly thinking about leaving a couple of years ago, but um I was kind of relieved when I did. And it yeah, it's just that you know, you build your life here and your friends are here and your network, and this is a great setup for my work. You know, I I don't want to be working alone somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

And um yeah, I do I do um I do crave the the the yeah being out out and about.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

But also you you're a vegetarian who works in vellum.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

This is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

The other big contradiction, irony of my life, I got addicted to vellum. Um as I told you, it was um accidental that I started working here. Yeah, discovering this material that has since sort of just become so fascinating to me and um and so extraordinary and has transformed my work in a way.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

So it's well it has, hasn't it? And it's so I mean you touched on it a little bit earlier, but what are the key differences between vellum and leather? Because it seems to be the vellum has kind of taken more prominence in your work in recent years.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

I just love it as a material, it's so fine, you can pair it and make it translucent, it's it's um very interesting sort of chromatically because it comes in lots of dyed in lots of vivid colours, it's you can sculpt it because you starch paste it and it becomes malleable and you can uh starch paste it.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

What is what is that?

SPEAKER_01 16:03

So so it's um it's almost like a sort of archive or wallpaper paste, but it's what we use to so you work it into the vellum over a time of about it depends how big the piece is, but maybe 20 minutes or so. So the vellum becomes saturated with it. So vellum, as it comes as a skin, is um quite like rigid paper. Um but then when you starch paste it, it becomes malleable, so you can cast it around things or sculpt it. So I do a lot of that in my work and slicing it very finely, onlaying tiny little bits which become more translucent if you pair them, so you can sort of you could onlay a paired bit of white vellum onto colour and kind of get the the pattern of the hair follicles, so you can almost like paint paint with it.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

I mean you came to wider attention when you won the Perio Jouet Salon Prize or award rather in 2014, and subsequently you followed that up by being in the Jailed Makers Open in 2017. Um you showed some extraordinary emotional work that was based around the death of your partner Richard from uh non-Hodgkinson lymphoma. Um I mean that must have been incredibly difficult for all kinds of reasons, Laura.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

It was um yeah, it was extraordinary how I mean we've talked about my previous work, and it's always been things that have been very important to me, but not about my personal life as such. So yeah, that was a really interesting, and it I think it was because it sort of came by stages. So I had this idea about making this work, and I was really um, you know, when those ideas form and you're thinking, but I couldn't put that out in the world, that's so personal. It's kind of and then I um I had a weekend free because my daughter was at her grandparents, and um I thought, right, I'm gonna write this genoic proposal. And I managed to do that, and I think maybe to put it down on paper that really, and it it sounded it sounded okay on paper, it sounded, you know, like this was something maybe I could do.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Can we talk a bit about it? Because there were three pieces, I think I'm right saying, and what did those three pieces comprise of?

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Um, so the first one was um it was called uh pathogenesis, so it was like the beginning of the disease. So um these were different pieces. One of them was just a very emotive response to I mean that they're all based on biological systems and the cellular and the molecular, and the kind of things that I, you know, it's sort of my visual language is is the small and the intricate, and the um so so the cellular and molecular seemed like a a good way to go. Um also for a very specific reason that you're given all these medical explanations when when someone is ill and you can't always process that, and there seemed to be a real, you know, you can be given objective scientific information, but it somehow doesn't tally with uh someone someone's illness or someone's physical pain, or you know, so I was really interested in that that sort of somehow reconciling those two. And there were there was a real swing between being really interested in the objective biology of it, especially when I went to see the um the consultant that I worked with, the hematology consultant.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

And um so you had the hematology consultant involved in the project from the year?

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Yeah, I got in touch with him, and and he and it was quite interesting seeing him because obviously he could be very candid with me because it was after the event, so so it's not the same experience as seeing the consultants were during Richard's illness. And um yeah, so it was and obviously it was something in the making process and the exploring of materiality that was going to tie the two together for me personally, because that's how I kind of assimilate things, that's you know, to make it's very instinctual for me to make um uh to understand. Um but I don't know how that translates to other people, that's the thing. It's kind of um I mean it was very interesting to hear people's reactions to it. Um they seemed, I think, seemed people connected with it more when they were told of the very specific narrative of it. So it was kind of the the three pieces reflected the the progression of the illness. Um, some of them were sort of uh cellular or molecular representations of that. Um there was so there was a kind of medical narrative that went right through the the three pieces, um, and but there was also quite a lot of personal narrative, so I made material references to things um that were personal between Richard and I. So um actually uh I I used some materials that weren't vellum, um especially medical cards. Yeah, I used medical cards, and um because I thought I could pair that in a similar way to vellum, and I used a bit of birch bark, so all sort of uh and some platinum, because that was a reference to one of the drugs that he had to take. Um so yeah, so there was all this kind of narratives woven through it on on quite a lot of different levels, and that was really interesting tying all that together.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Um I think you described it as a reconciliation between the microscopic, the scientific, and the emotional experience of what was actually happening to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

But obviously that's a very personal way of doing that, yeah, of assimilating that.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Um yeah did you find it cathartic?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Um it's so hard to say. I think I think I did. I I think um it was very hard to make some of it. Um but then you know you're going through the grieving process anyway. So what what part of that is is just the grieving process, and what part is you know um, yeah. No, I think it was good. And I like I um I really appreciate it. I appreciated people's response to it and their sort of sensitivity about it and um yeah and empathy and um yeah it was I mean it was an enormously moving piece of work.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

I mean I'm I'm kind of intrigued you it took you a year before you started. Was there a point where you turned and said, I can I can well A make about this, but B ultimately if you're doing something like the jailword in a very public space, you're gonna have to talk about it as well, like we're doing now, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Yeah, sure. I mean that was the thing when I actually got it. I sort of didn't finish that story. It was it was because you don't really necessarily expect to get these things, you know. And then I I I do remember the moment where I got the phone call saying you've you've got it. And that was like, uh, okay, so now I really do have to do this in a public arena. It was very real all of a sudden, but um luckily it yeah, it was it was well well received.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Yeah, it was beautiful. I mean, because uh sorry to dwell on this, but I'm just just kind of intrigued. Um because I've been on the jailwood makers panel, I've been a judge, and you know, you you have to pitch quite hard. I mean it's quite it's quite a rigorous selection criteria. Um that must have been tricky when it w you're pitching something that's very personal in what is effectively a kind of competitive environment, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah, I think I was very aware that um I didn't want them to think it was just sort of therapy. Yeah. Because I thought, you know, I I've got to sort of yeah, I guess I was quite objective about it, because I was like, I've got to be quite professional about this because you know I it can I can see how this could come across as someone's just like gonna have a breakdown in the middle of it or something, or you know, it's kind of um yeah, using this as a sort of therapeutic tool, which um I suppose you are to some extent, but you still got to you still got to make it and be professional about it at the same time. So yeah, it's uh and that was probably good for me to do that, deal with it on that basis as well. A slight um detachment, which is useful in some circumstances, so yes, yes, I'm sure. But but also the sort of compartmentalizing, which is what you have to do when someone's ill, it's it's quite an interesting reflection of you know, otherwise you can't uh you have to compartmentalize to some extent to just keep on going.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Because were you making while Richard was ill?

SPEAKER_01 24:25

I was, yeah. Um I was quite busy because I um yeah, I was making the because so I'd had the Perri Jué the year before, and then uh um Contemporary Polidart asked me to make a piece for collect. So that was around the time that he died, yeah. So so yeah, yeah, it was um I have no idea how I I uh yeah, how I did that. That period was kind of because our daughter was um she was a year and a half when he died, so she was eight months when he was diagnosed, so yeah, so it was um a pretty crazy time, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Because she's six now, has she seen the pieces? Do do they mean things to her?

SPEAKER_01 25:05

No, she's um she just takes it for granted that um I mean she loves coming into the workshop and she she calls my sculptures boring now. She doesn't really remember him because she was so young. I mean obviously we talk about him and photos and sort of um but yeah, so uh which is fortunate in the way that it's not such a loss for her because you know if it was to happen now it would be devastating to her. Um but yeah, so she no, she hasn't related my work to it yet. So I guess maybe when she's older I'll tell her about uh yeah, I guess there'll be much more qu many more questions from her as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

So yeah. I mean a little like um Edmund Duval, who we've had on this series, um, those pieces were were presented in a very particular kind of vitrine. The way that they're cased was very important to to the presentation.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yeah, yeah. And now I'm kind of thinking about um going back to more sort of immersive environments, which I really did in my work before. Um but that was that was a very particular thing for that thing because it was yeah, it was like the isolation of biotic systems, which is a very science sort of scientific device. So you um kind of isolate things in order to understand them, but then there's sort of no emotive kind of connection to that, and and what I was talking about before about compartmentalizing and kind of so there was lots of yeah, that they were very important the displays, and I wanted them to be very scientific and very clinical.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah, they're very precise.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

In yeah, in contrast to the because my making's so intricate and kind of it needs something to offset, I think. I mean on a visual level, quite apart from anything. But yeah, now I'm kind of and everyone wants to put my work in boxes because I think it's so fragile and like I think so now I'm thinking more out of boxes.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Uh and also i i in that work, uh and this is a thread that runs through a lot of your pieces, I think, um, is there's this blurring that we talked about in the introduction of fact and fiction. Some of it is accurate, some of it isn't. What's your fascination with that?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I think it it's it's to do with how you express uh what's in your imagination, really. And it fascinates me how the how the making process kind of transforms that. Um and yeah, I think that reflects the sort of ambiguity of these things because it it's it's aspects taken from life and it's aspects taken from your imagination, and it's um it sort of mimics how weird like human artifice can be, and you know how yeah, we're always creating these these weird artificial things, and uh yeah, I'm fascinated by that. Slightly repelled by it sometimes, but I was so fascinated.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Because you I mean you do an awful lot of research for for a lot of your projects. I mean that the the lichen stuff that came before the the Johad Make is open. What was the interest in lichen? What where did that come from?

SPEAKER_01 28:08

I've always loved lichen, it's just like one of those little details that's so fascinating and it's so varied, and and then finding out that it had such a um such wider implications for the environment that it you know it's very indicative of the environment that it grows in. So and that was what the whole piece was about. So some of it thrives in very toxic environments, some of it thrives in very, very clean environments, and you can tell a lot about them. And I I don't know, I just love that idea that if you look closely enough, and uh you know, this little thing that's all often overlooked, and you know, obviously I'm fascinated by the beauty of that detail anyway, but yeah, I could tell you so much about a sort of uh on a on a bigger scale, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

And was the German difficult to follow up? I mean, it was such obviously emotive and personal project. I mean, for the Women's Aircraft Prize, uh, you elected to create pieces that took their cues from the 19th century biologist, I think I might say. Haeck, yeah, Ernst Haeckel. Um, what was it about him that you found fascinating?

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Oh, so that's so the first piece in the Woman's Hourcraft Prize I'd actually made previous to the Joe Wood stuff. So the so the Woman's Hourcraft Prize was sort of a narrative of pieces. So there were two pieces that I've made previously, and then I made one new piece for which was sort of a full- So Haeckel had been brewing for a while, yeah. And the the second Haeckel that was there, because there were three pieces in that, so there was another piece that was based on Haeckel's drawings. But a lot of people confused that with a piece that I made, which was the first piece of the Joe Wood. Actually, to answer an earlier question, I I um I did start making just after Richard died, but it was a very emotive kind of response. So it was like I didn't, I don't know if I even knew that's what it was at the time, but it was kind of my imaginings of the cancer cell. And the second Haeckel piece has been very confused, especially by people that know me quite well with this with this first piece. So it was it was weird, there was like a dialogue between the two works. And then the third piece was um a sea squirt, which because I was starting to look at the sort of medical um technology and cancer and um uh immunology and stuff, and um this sea squirt, they found some substance in it that's very crucial in cancer medication, or they think is going to be very crucial in cancer. So it was kind of so there was a dialogue between the Gerwood and the Women's Hour of Craft Prize, actually, and it was kind of um and uh there was another piece I made for Collect in 2018, and that was about immunotherapy and future therapies. And I think I I proposed that for the Gerwood, but didn't do it in the end because I thought it just wasn't right because that wasn't the outcome, and it was like I wasn't at that stage yet, you know, that's not what happened to Richard, that's not so yeah, so that became a separate fourth piece in the Jood series, I guess. But um, yeah, and after that year um I was completely exhausted because I had the Jood and the Woman's Our Craft Prize, and and I went to uh Treasor with the Crafts Council, and um it was just yeah, bonkers, brilliant bonkers.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

And um and you must have had to with all these things, a Women's Our Craft Prize, you're on Radio 4. Um yeah, you must have spent a year talking about a very difficult topic, I imagine.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I think it it'd probably be a bit more difficult since I think it's very easy to distract yourself with external things, isn't it? So yeah, that's kind of uh so more difficult now. Uh has I mean it's it's been quite quiet for my work again as well. I'm getting used to this this roller coaster effect with the work, seems since I restart I restarted in about 2013, because I just thought because I wasn't really making work for uh for quite a long time after I left the royal college.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

I tried for a bit, but yeah, why was why was that? Um because you talked about being burnt out by the Royal College.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

Well, I I was doing shows and stuff after the Royal College. I think it was just I was just sick of sort of um just scraping by really. It was as simple as that. It was it was hard to survive, and I kind of and I got steady work here, which was making. It wasn't, you know, my own making, but it was still making, and it was a nice environment to work in. I think I just, yeah, I just needed a bit of a I I just had I had a salary for a few years, you know. And um, yeah, and then but I did get to the point where I was um, I need to make my own work again, otherwise I'm gonna regret it for the rest of my life, you know. It was really nice.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

And so was there a moment because you make the the the pieces that you make come from scraps from this environment that you work in. Was there a moment when you were looking at a load of scraps going, I can do something with this?

SPEAKER_01 32:56

I I think I started experimenting.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Um I you know, I made a few books because we you could learn how to make, but that wasn't really my thing. And um yeah, I think there was always that in the background. And then um I went Rich and I went travelling for about nine months um and got back in 2010, and I think as soon as I yeah, I start after that I really start to think I've got to I've got to get back to this.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

I'm intrigued, was the form of the pieces you began to make, was that dictated by the material itself? Um these kind of tendrils that come off them and the intricacy that you've you talked about.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

And that I mean that's what I love about Vellum, it's like it gives you that or that material for me gives me that real feedback. So there's a real dialogue with the material, and you know, we were talking earlier about making what's in your mind's eye, but that's always transformed in the making process. So and I yeah, I love that that sort of interaction and that kind of and the other you know, you don't want to just produce what's in your mind's eye, you want some some feedback from the physical world and uh yeah, so I I um I mean in terms of your mind's eye, do you draw?

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Do you have a sense of how these things are going to start when you're making it or is it all just live?

SPEAKER_01 34:17

I mean you can see these little maquettes that I started making. Oh, and actually these are I I just sort of playing with them on the wall, but they're um I have loads of these. So I sort of make instead of draw. Right. Make it make as a sketch in a way. Yeah, yeah. Some things work and some things don't.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

And from that, and do they get bigger then when when you've made a maquette, do you say right, this that's on a certain scale I can scale this up?

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Or uh they don't usually get bigger. They usually get they usually a lot of my work's constructed actually. I mean I do do some casting to get particular forms, but yeah, that they're they're I would say they're more construction constructed than sculpted.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Well it's quite interesting because because unlike well not everybody, but some people we would talk to on this podcast who are commit to a material from a very young age, uh often ceramices at school. I mean you've you've come relatively late to Vellum, but are you completely committed to it now? Is this something can you could you ever imagine working in anything else?

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Possibly, because I have before. I think for a good while that you know I'm um I still think there's a lot of scope in this material, and um I'm still quite fascinated with it. So and I quite like to explore the idea that it's actually skin. Because I haven't. I'm fascinated.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

How do you get how do you explore that?

SPEAKER_01 35:35

I don't know yet. I don't know, because it's always there and that and you know, people have brought it up in interviews and stuff, understandably, because you're um quite apart from the vegetarian thing. This, you know, and it and it became a bit more apparent with the Joe Wood work, I think, because obviously that was cellular and not very bodily. So it's kind of uh starting to emerge as um yeah. I met uh I did a uh workshop in um Bristol during the when was our craft prize and I met a scientist who was specialising in sk skin aging, I think. I really like to get back into I kept in touch with her because I'd be interested to see how that that would. And and I enjoy that collaboration. That worked really well on the Joid.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

So is this the future?

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Could be, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um I I as you can see, it's not a fully formed idea, but yeah, I'm interested as as a boundary, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Very good, very good. Well, Laura, we've taken up loads of your time. Thank you very, very much.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

All right, thank you. Really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

And to learn more about Laura's work, go to LauraYoungstonCole.co.uk. There are images from the interviews as well as little films and other things on my Instagram page, Grant on Design. If you've enjoyed listening and want to see this podcast flourish, then please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this from. And go to my Patreon page and make a pledge. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash material matters. You'll be helping to take the message of the importance of material, skill, craft, and design to a whole new audience. Thanks very much for listening.