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Artists and Artworks - Lucy Skaer

'I am interested in the idea that the corpse or cadaver is a naturally occurring image - it is the perfect likeness of the living person, and yet it has become fundamentally different. My work explores the movement of images, and plays with the degree to which they are separate from first hand experience. Moments of trauma are structured into compositions taken from sources such as coats of arms and propaganda posters. Walking a line between documentation and symbolism, these works seek to question the way in which you read them.'

Lucy's drawings utilise found imagery sourced from photojournalistic reportage. Typically Lucy uses graphite for the main substance of her drawings to which enamel paint, ink and gold leaf are added. Merging photo-originated images with different forms of patterning, Skaer creates shifting collages that move from the emotive to the reified. At play here is our familiarity with the compositional structure of Venn diagrams, heraldry, oriental porcelain design and Rorsach ink blots. Read the entire article here Source: www.channel4.com

If You Go First And I Remain … by Lucy Skaer

Henry VIII's Wives is a collaborative group founded in 1997 based in Scotland and Scandinavia. Its members--Rachel Dagnall, Bob Grieve, Sirko Knuepfer, Simon Polli, Per Sander and Lucy Skaer--met while students in the Environmental Art Department of the Glasgow School of Art. The group was named shortly after the death of Princess Diana in September 1997.
The name bears a relation to this event but was also chosen because it refuses to label the activities or members of the group (i.e., the date, sex, context and chronology), as it is in almost every way inappropriate. We have been involved in numerous collaborative performative works and installations including Mercedes CL600 (1998) in which we replicated the damage inflicted on Princess Diana's car; Nine Reasons to be an Optimist (1999), a photograph of 10 religious leaders who were invited by the group to meet in a disused airport control tower; and A Pictorial History of the 20th Century (1999) in which elderly day care center inhabitants were posed in re creations of iconic media photographs such as the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald and the aftermath of a napalm attack.
The group gathers several weeks before each show to create site-specific works from materials appropriate to each concept. We work with materials that are close at hand or stand out in a particular context. Just after Christmas in Norway, marzipan was on sale so we devised a work using this material, combining film footage of the marzipan with a soundtrack of the cheapest country records we could find. At other times the idea dictates the materials, as in Mercedes CL600 where using a car was essential for representing the actual damage. As a group we are constantly involved in discussion while we work. Read the entire article here
Source: www.findarticles.com

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