Indigo Wills
Falmouth University graduate and 2024 Platform Graduate Awardee, Indigo Wills uses techniques of queering and fictioning. In recent work, Indigo has started to burrow into the familiar terrain of the mining landscapes she grew up around, finding queer kinship in the mineral veins and muddy ground.
In this Spotlight feature, Indigo talks about life after graduation and her relationship to the Cornish landscape.
Staying can be as radical as leaving
Indigo Wills
I have recently been offered a place to study on a PhD program but like so often in the arts I wasn’t offered funding and so I’m fairly sure I’ll have to turn it down. I applied with a project aiming to explore the intersections of mining landscapes as archives and their potential to unearth queer fictions.
I grew up in Redruth in Cornwall, a small town twenty-five minutes away from Falmouth University where I chose to study. Using my writing practice to explore connections between rural queer identity and the mining landscapes, I have embedded myself in my home soil. I say this because when I was growing up, I felt a deep pressure to leave, to escape to a city where things never sleep, and the lights are endless. You get to college, and they start telling you the best art schools are in London and so you feel you should go there to satisfy that need to be told you’ve made it!
Staying can be as radical as leaving. I know for a lot of people leaving is necessary or wanted but not for everyone. I wanted to stay close to the mining ruins and exploited ground, I felt a kinship to it and nurturing that felt important to me and my practice. I still feel this.
In September for the first time, I’ll be existing away from the structure of a school or university. After graduating from my BA, I chose to come back to study my MA, I was in a privileged position where I could stay longer than many people can. I partly chose this because I had heard of the cliff edge you fall off after university, I watched my sister do it, I listened to her talk about how hard it was, and I wasn’t quite ready to face that.
Since graduating my sister has gone back to university and she says taking time away was the best thing she did. She tells me this as I sit anticipating the MA finishing and the cliff edge which will inevitably follow.
Image: For The Mineral Vein [book marks on the wall], Indigo Wills, 2025
Post-graduation brings on a whole load of questions about what you’re doing with your life, who you are, what you want, how to fund what you want, how to figure the next bit out. I’m experiencing all of this now, a year later than my friends, three years later than my sister.
Most of my friends graduated last year and are all working in jobs, some in the arts and some not, trying to figure out the balance between having a practice and earning money. Whilst figuring it out, they have all found ways to make, perhaps not in the ways they are used to or how they did it whilst at university but very much still making. Being surrounded by a network of people who are in a similar situation has been a huge support! They know more than most what this bit feels like.
I think graduating is terrifying, I think the process of moving your art practice away from the setting you are so used to creating in takes some time to figure out. But if there are things you feel certain about, it is a good idea to follow those. I know I want to stay in Cornwall, my relationship to the landscape is integral to the work I make. I’m using this as the starting point to figure out what comes next.
Indigo Wills at Chapel Porth Beach, 2025
See more of Indigo’s work here
Read more about the Platform Graduate Award here