The 18th-century chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park provides a backdrop to some of the estate’s most exciting exhibitions, from last winter’s field of reflective discs by Liz West going back to Ai Weiwei’s 2014 intervention. This spring, it’s the turn of ‘living sculptor’ Laura Ellen Bacon, and it seems a natural progression for an institution so adept at bringing ‘indoor’ forms and professional sheen to its 500 acres. In a reversal, Bacon will occupy the chapel’s interior with a monolithic willow-branch structure, she calls Into Being. True to its name, she has gradually and organically woven the amorphous work into existence, using a methodical knotting technique perfected over decades.

Bacon has built a career invading and transforming architectural landmarks around the world with her ephemeral creatures, both of this earth and seemingly not. Like her previous site-specific works, Into Being appears to grow in place — an event as much as a sculpture. Woven in situ from sustainable Somerset willow, it inhabits the heritage building, encroaching six metres into the nave and climbing three metres up the wall.

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Laura Ellen Bacon, ‘Into Being’. Photography: India Hobson, courtesy YSP

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Riffing on an ancient willow-weaving technique, Bacon laced together a skeleton from fallen beech branches foraged on the YSP’s 500-acre grounds. To create an impenetrable skin, she amassed 80 bundles of slender Dicky Meadows willow, coaxing the long strands into an ordered chaos of mesh. The self-supporting form evolved organically and instinctively from the original sketches, taking on a life of its own as Bacon knotted in quiet contemplation.

‘Making it on site was a dream,’ she says. ‘I was able to work with the rising and falling light in the space, both of which inform the flow of the inner folds of weave. Also, I could witness the acoustics of the space change when I’m deep in the woven willow folds.’

The process took eight weeks in all.

Visitors can explore the curves and folds of the work all summer, inhaling the aroma of the natural willow and basking in light from the chapel windows. Smaller works by the artist appear in the vestry and on the balcony, including the wall-based stripped-willow sculpture Contact. When the exhibition ends on 7 September 2025, Bacon will dismantle the central piece and repurpose the material on the YSP grounds as a wildlife habitat.

Her next exhibition will open on 28 June at the Clark museum in Massachusetts.

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