AS a young girl in the 1970s, Laura Ellen Bacon grew up on a small fruit farm on a south-facing slope in Derbyshire. Surrounded by raspberries and strawberries, she not only became adept at plucking the fruits from the stems, filling baskets for local orders, with the odd handful snaffled for sustenance, but found herself with mountains of cut fruit-cane to play with. The cane proved the perfect material for shaping ever-more-elaborate dens and treehouses, bolstered further by bits of wood procured from her joiner grandfather. Before long, an obsession was born.
Her artworks have weight and presence and a strange quality of having always existed
‘I was 11 when I asked for a hammer for Christmas,’ she chuckles. ‘I didn’t mean a child’s
