Shuffling through a post-lockdown wardrobe to figure out what to wear to meet two of the greatest fashion icons of your prime is daunting — until you decide the icons won’t notice or care, having walked away from fashion themselves. These days Nicole Farhi and Lucille Lewin are dressed-down artists who devote every working hour to making sculpture.
“I don’t even shop for clothes any more,” says Farhi, who cannot help but look effortlessly chic in one of the big menswear shirts over casual trousers which have become her everyday wear.“Now my daughter buys my clothes for me after all the years I spent dressing her. If I go out, it’s to a foundry or to see an exhibition.”
Lewin, greeting me at her home studio in an old sweater, claims to still love fashion when she’s away from her kiln, but it was the last thing she and Fahri talked about when they bumped into each other a few years ago: “I knew she was sculpting, but I was just a newbie; however, she came to look at my work and it was the start of a new kind of friendship,” says the founder and former creative director of Whistles, the fashion design and retail empire she sold in 2001.
She is brewing me a coffee at the elegantly minimalist kitchen end of the huge living area which started life as a Victorian school playground, was formerly the Whistles design studio and has now been reconfigured into the home she shares with her husband. In the past decade she graduated with a Masters from the Royal College of Art and showed her work at the V&A the year after her 70th birthday. Farhi, two years her senior, was among those who admired her work there.
Now, like Lewin herself, her Marylebone home is undergoing a metamorphosis; for most of October it will become the venue for a “Meet the Makers”type show in which Fahri and Lewin will exhibit their work together, dropping in for part of the time to engage with visitors. Why now? For one thing, the artists were keen to show new work sooner than galleries were available to show it, given the havoc wreaked on exhibition schedules by the months of lockdown. Secondly, it’s Frieze month, and “art dealers from all over the world will be in town,”says Lewin, who, despite having won a major ceramics prize in her last year at the RCA and shown her work at one of London’s great art museums still does not have a gallery affiliation, nor the overseas connections which have helped Farhi gain an international clientele.
Fahri’s sales have been hit by the pandemic too. “An American couple who were coming to see my literary heads with a view to buying some were prevented from visiting by Covid,” she tells me as we gaze up at the staircase of her Hampstead mansion lined with tiny busts of dozens of authors and playwrights, a series inspired by her husband Sir David Hare. That bronze sits in the gallery of the university in Austin, Texas, which has Hare’s papers, and Farhi has an ongoing commission to sculpt a bust of every playwright who comes to judge the annual drama awards at Yale.
Sculpting series of her heroes is what preoccupies Fahri now —her studio in an old greenhouse is packed with tiny, painted bronzes of admired characters she may not get to bring to her new show for lack of space. They include Anne Frank, commemorated alongside the likes of Malala and Nelson Mandela: “because she was the one who gave us the knowledge of what Jews went through during the Holocaust.”
Live models were the inspiration for her Folds series, celebrating the voluptuous tucks in the flesh of headless female bodies – some will be on show next week along with new sculptures never exhibited before, including a series of women embracing each other with kindness. Lockdown has been a prolific time for Farhi, who relished the opportunity to stay at home and work every day:“For 30 years I had to fit my sculpture into free time — weekends and then the Wednesdays I started taking off work as it started to become very important.” A student of art as well as fashion during her early years in Paris, Farhi’s passion for the former was accelerated when she met world-famous sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who became her mentor, when she was casting her first bronze in 1985. After Stephen Marks, her former partner with whom she set up fashion chain French Connection before they launched her signature label, sold the business, she thought: “This is my chance”, and left for her studio immediately after showing her last collection in 2013.
Unlike Farhi, Lewin lacked a mentor to nurture her new career, one reason she is keen to find a gallery. Her portfolio majors on abstract assemblies in white porcelain which reflect her preoccupation with climate change and man’s interaction with nature —there are forms reminiscent of coral, driftwood and other organic beach forms, perhaps subconsciously inspired by her childhood in South Africa, where she lived in Port Elizabeth and other beach towns. She sees her work as political and entirely abstract, interrogating the collision between man and nature, our fragility and the struggle to control our lives: “It’s a dark subject.”
As for the new work she will show, “it came tumbling out once I stopped feeling frozen with fear at the start of lockdown, when I was totally anxious and unable to do anything,” she says. She enjoys working at a studio complex in Holborn which accommodates 141 artists, where she keeps one of her two kilns. “I’m very social — even during lockdown. I had Zoom meetings, Zoom lunches — I love being out and about now. But if you weren’t subject to death or suffering or losing your job, lockdown was a remarkable period — you had time to think.”
Is there as much difference between the work of these two women following the same career trajectory for the second time as in their personalities? Farhi, the recluse, thinks there is: “Her work is about the chaos of life, while mine is more about peace, and it’s full of detail, while I’m not good at doing small.” Lewin, agrees, but says Farhi has been the grande dame in the 40 years they’ve known each other: “I was always the smaller sister. The way we approach sculpture represents the work we did in fashion; it’s different, but we both use a lot of white and we are both wedded to our materials .”
And, both women agree, they had a will to harness the energy sparked by their creative collision to create their own show rather than wait passively for a gap in a gallery exhibition schedule in the wake of the pandemic: “One has to make things happen in a different way now rather than sit and wait for things to happen,” notes Lewin, adding that she has not even thought about what she will wear during the exhibition: “I’m just looking forward to talking to people about my work.”
In Good Company runs from October 5-22 at 78 Chiltern Street; timed entry slots must be pre-booked through Eventbrite: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-good-company-lucille-lewin-nicole-farhi-tickets-159411806003
