LILY LAVORATO
Artist in residence with The Writers' Room for October 2026
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Working across sculpture, drawing and writing, Lily’s wounded forms point to ruptures in bodies and landscapes to explore moments of transition, vulnerability and gestures of care. Their paternal family are rooted in a mountainous village in Calabria, a rural region of Southern Italy. At The Writers' Room, Lily has been working on story currently titled 'Songs of a Bad Life' and new sculptural works drawing on research into subterranean mirror cities and presentations of honour, shame and masculinity in Southern Italian culture.“ He creamed his pants for the concrete bunker, in the same way his father had said his grandfather had. Above all else, it was bigger, damper, more well-furnished than any other he’d seen before. The entrance was in an old house. He would open a cupboard in the tired kitchen to a narrow tunnel leading below. One day, crawling through, his broad shoulders became stuck in the hole. He had always been able to bend bones when needed. It wasn’t always every bone and it wasn’t always the right bone at the right time. But here in this moment, his collar bone yielded and softened in his entrapment. Leaving a hollow space at the crevice of his neck, a small part at the far left edge stayed firm and he traced the drop off, a step over a cliff edge into a swirling pool of water. He could feel parts of himself he didn’t usually. Stuck in this place, a small piece of rock jutted in from behind and pushed upwards into him. For the first two years it was sharp, but a constant gyration of his hips, whilst trying to escape, meant that by the third year, it had become smooth, burnished by his body. He would rub against it, dripping over the rock, lubricating an escape. Something awakened and reminded him that he could leave this place”. — extract from ‘Songs of a Bad Life’
