Lucy Gregory

Engaging with conflicting notions of humor and constraint, I create devices that lure in the spectator, with the imagined potential to trap these bodies.

Potential energy and an inherent action within colonies of objects have a strong currency within my material-led practice. The performer is the catalyst for action to ensue, and the gallery becomes an arena to perform with the latent objects that lie in waiting. Real bodies animate fractured sets or props: the inhuman and the human intertwined in a bizarre and comic realization.

I enjoy extruding and re-contextualizing images back into uncanny objects from the flatness of the screen to create surreal collages that question and complicate a relation between materiality and virtuality. Depth, volume and the transient articulate my engagement with energetic processes.

Uncanny laws govern the cartoon world and un-explained forces are pitted against the predictive schema of scientific rationalism. I am interested in the agency of materials moving in autonomy beyond the hands of the maker and the sentience these seemingly inanimate objects, traps and assemblages seem to possess – which allows them to become characters in their own right within the cartoon narrative. Importantly, images have agency too, driven by desires, needs, appetites and demands similar to other organic ecosystems. “Images have legs” [1] as they travel through digital networks, entering and departing from the material world through methods of re-printing, re-photographing and re-purposing.

 The cartoon landscape perhaps acts as a parallel of our own world – tapping into a contemporary anxiety concerning a loss of control of human agency in society, as geopolitical, technological and ecological narratives are marked by uncertainty. We are alive in an environment of lively systems, human and non-human alike, we exist prepositionally – above and below, amongst and within.  

[1] W. J. Thomas Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), p.31.