Artist Laura Ellen Bacon's sculptural installation made from willow at the YSP Chapel

When Bacon was first approached by the team at YSP and invited to make the work, she went to visit the Chapel. “I have seen many wonderful exhibitions and installations there but at the time I went to visit the space it was empty and that was quite helpful,” she says. “As a building it is so intriguing – there are lots of interesting architectural details that you notice as you walk around it, and as a gallery space it has such lovely, clean lines. It was lovely to reacquaint myself with the interior; to see the way the wall is shaped by the window so that light can pour downwards. And I love the stone floor.”

Bacon says that during those initial visits she was inspired by the atmosphere in the Chapel and the strong sense she had of the human history laid down within its walls. “You can feel the physicality of the previous life of the building – all those congregations, gatherings of people coming in and going out. To walk the floor and move through the space – that was a really important beginning. It was good to see the way the light changes over the course of a day and I like the fact that you can hear birdsong and see the trees outside.”

Having spent time in the gallery and taken photographs, Bacon then started to reflect on the space and think about what she would like to create within it. “There is a meditative aspect to my work but I am also pragmatic,” she says. “So, I do really like to get a sense of a space and get a handle on what my feelings about it; then once I have that I can move on to the practicalities.” Part of that is thinking about the visitor experience and the different angles from which people will be able to explore the work. “With this I wanted people to be able to walk around it and walk inside it – and then one of the really special things about the Chapel is that you have the balcony area – it is fabulous to have that in the space so that you can witness the structure from above.”

The form has an organic feel to it, partly to do with the materials used of course, which apart from the willow includes branches from fallen beech trees at YSP. While abstract, it also has a figurative element in its muscular shape and the way in which it appears to be moving along the floor. It seems to be reaching towards one of the windows and Bacon says she has been asked whether it is coming in from the outside or trying to escape. “That is up to the viewer to decide,” she says. “It is open to interpretation and I like the fact that people usually have their own take on the forms I make. Some people say it looks like enormous tree roots which pleases me, but ultimately it represents itself.”

Bacon first began working with willow over 20 years ago and it developed indirectly from her childhood relationship with the natural world. “I had already started to use branches in my work and I wanted to try and reconnect with the sense of creativity I had when I was a child,” she says. “Until I was 18 my parents had a fruit farm; I was left to may own devices quite a lot and I loved making dens. I would work really hard on them in all weathers. My mum grew raspberries and I used to make burrows in the raspberry cane – which is a similar width to willow – and that was something I craved to get back to. I was trying to recreate the feeling of making a space that you could get inside that I had made on my own. That really appealed to me and it’s something that has never left me.”

She describes working with willow as a contemplative process. “Weaving is repetitive and physical and I enjoy that, I become totally absorbed in it and it is very methodical. I have a sense of the work in my mind and then it evolves in the space as it is being made,” she says. “I chose the title Into Being for various reasons. When people ask me about how my work is made from a craft perspective, I essentially ‘will’ them into being.”

In addition to the main installation, which took Bacon eight weeks to construct, there are four smaller works and some drawings in the vestry and on the balcony, including a wall-mounted sculpture Contact (2021) and floor-based Companion (2024). You can see in her work a celebration of the joy of manipulating raw materials by hand. At the end of the exhibition, the large-scale sculpture will be dismantled and the material reused in the landscape to create wildlife habitats.

Bacon hopes the exhibition will encourage visitors to slow down and take a moment of contemplation. “I would like people to feel they have had a chance to pause and be absorbed by something inside that space,” she says. “And if it also takes them out into the parkland and helps them look at trees and nature in a new light, I would like that too.”

Lara Ellen Bacon: Into Being is at the Chapel, Yorkshire Sculpture Park until September 7. ysp.org.uk