This autumn, Second Lives extends its new partnership with City Lit through three London events: a celebrated fashion designer turning to ceramics, a Mental Wealth Festival panel on creativity and recovery, and two touring musicians who quietly built second lives as working painters on canvas.
Runway, Rupture and Reinvention: Lucille Lewin In Conversation
The season opens with the partnership’s inaugural artist conversation. Lucille Lewin spent decades shaping British fashion as founder of Whistles and Creative Director of Liberty. In 2014, she enrolled in City Lit’s Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, a decision that led her toward sculpture in metal, glass and clay. Her work now explores fractured, ambiguous forms, abstractions that gesture at figure, environment and architecture at once.
Moderated by City Lit Principal Mark Malcomson and introduced by co-curators Paula Lent and Jane Neal, the evening will trace what it takes to step away from a celebrated career and begin again.
Clay, Crisis and Coming Back
Second Lives joins City Lit’s twelfth annual Mental Wealth Festival for a panel on creativity, resilience and recovery. Ceramicist Marice Cumber returned to her practice at 57, after a thirty-year break shaped by motherhood and a severe mental health crisis. She has since exhibited at the Royal Academy and founded Accumulate, The Art School for the Homeless. Her hand-built stoneware vessels function as a kind of visual confession, turning what she once hid into something spoken aloud.
Joining her is Dr Sharon Taylor, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist whose own practice bridges art, science and storytelling through clay. Arts writer Hettie Judah and educator Ian Tucknott, co-curator of the festival, complete the panel.
Double Time: Second Lives on Tour and on Canvas
Two musicians turned painters, Emma Richardson and Kate Jackson, close out the series in conversation. Emma Richardson, bassist for Pixies and formerly of Band of Skulls, makes large-scale, cinematic oil paintings drawn from feminist writing, Surrealism and Baroque drama. Kate Jackson, once frontwoman of The Long Blondes, now paints motorways and transport infrastructure, citing Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Smart as touchstones.
Both women have sustained two demanding creative lives simultaneously, one on stage, one on canvas. Transatlantic art authority Carrie Scott will lead the conversation on what that duality costs, and what it gives back.
Each evening includes a reception with wine and an opportunity to meet the artists directly, a deliberate choice that keeps the programme close to its founding premise.
All three events take place at City Lit, Keeley Street, London.
