- Venue
- Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces - Chester
- Location
- North West England
Estelle Woolley’s recent body of work is steeped in a tender, layered sense of mourning and memory. Emerging from the deep personal rupture of her family retiring from her childhood home, a farm where she lived for 33 years, Woolley explores through the language of natural materials and found objects she knows best, the Welsh concept of hiraeth—a homesickness not just for a place, but for a lost way of being, a deep ancestral grief. This intangible longing permeates her installations, which weave together natural materials, taxidermy, domestic objects, and forgotten relics unearthed from the backrooms of old shop stores.
In these works, alongside Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces Woolley repurposes disused commercial retail spaces—those once geared toward consumerism—into quiet sites of reflection and encounter. In doing so, she invites viewers to pause, gather stillness, and experience a slowing down that runs counter to the forward-thrust of urban modernity. Her choice to use and inhabit these empty storefronts is a powerful one: the abandoned shop becomes a symbolic container, a modern-day alchemical vessel where transformation, grief, and reverie can occur. It also speaks to the struggle that Cheshire based artists navigate to take up space in a global contemporary art world.
There is a delicate choreography in how her pieces coexist—like automaton machines at rest, momentarily stilled but brimming with latent potential. The childhood miniature sewing machine, the poised birds, the ceramic hands—all seem as though they might whir into life, not in the mechanical sense, but with the flickering of a dream. This whimsicality is underpinned by a yearning we can not ever quite grasp. Woolley’s assemblages recall long-forgotten childhood walks: whole days lost in hedgerows, rustling through fields, following insects or stories in the clouds, returning only when the streetlights flickered on. Her work captures that expansive, unmeasured time—days now compressed under the weight of screens, surveillance, and scheduled play. In this sense, the installations are not only sites of grief but also rebellion, reaching back toward freedom and embodied wonder. It’s a refusal to give up those endless days that stretch on forever, a call to stop and immerse ourselves in nature as our ancestors did and a subversion of capitalism beckoning towards unquestioned labour.
Woolley’s use of taxidermy—delicate birds held in unnerving positions, draped over glossy ceramic hands or perched upon child-sized sewing machines—speaks of both preservation and stasis. Woolley has spent time immersed within The Grosvenor Museum’s collection and has collected spider legs, claws and cows teeth to explore in her work for over a decade. These suspended creatures become symbolic messengers in Jungian terms: the bird as psyche, as the soul, as fleeting thought caught in the grip of the unconscious. Her black-glazed ceramic hand cradling a dead bird evokes the archetype of the Crone or Shadow Mother—death-dealing, but not malevolent; rather, a necessary witness to life’s cycles.
Equally evocative is her work with nests, which serve as literal and symbolic containers. In Jungian psychology, the nest can be seen as an image of the Self: a secure, enclosed structure made of fragments of the outside world—twigs, fur, plant matter—meticulously assembled to hold vulnerability. Woolley’s nests, nestled in crumbling retail displays or staged alongside decaying flora, hold not eggs but the residue of thoughts, memories, and identities. They become psychic holding environments, spaces where mourning and meaning coalesce.
The re-animation of discarded objects—old sewing machines, vases, twigs, and packaging materials—draws attention to the passage of time and the layering of narratives. Woolley who is also a musician, has a performativity embedded deep within her work, documented here through photography of the life drawing event where the muse played music and her sculptural nest and Woolley made inks from natural materials so that participants were invited to pause for a multisensory drawing practice.
The Grosvenor shop window does not sanitise these materials; instead, they are presented as uncanny, raw, aged, haunted. This connects with Jung’s idea of the unconscious as storehouse—where what is repressed or neglected in the psyche accumulates, waiting to be discovered, confronted, and ultimately integrated.
Estelle Woolley’s installations resist easy interpretation however they are invitational—offering a ritual-like space in which the viewer becomes participant, silently entangled in her world of quiet death, longing, and domestic ephemera. In the ruins of the everyday, Woolley locates portals to the archetypal and the sacred. She is not just preserving the past—she is stitching together a psychic map for how we might dwell in loss, wonder, and imagination.
