About
Victoria Lucas makes artworks that question, resist and reclaim selected geo-cultural landscapes. Projects are initiated and sustained through field visits to selected sites, where she spends time documenting their physicality and her encounters with them. A process of deconstruction and reconstitution through artistic means then takes place in the studio, as experiences, gathered imagery and sculptural impressions are layered, fragmented, reconstructed and reformed to create multifaceted works and installations.
Victoria uses a range of materials and processes to construct her artworks, including sculpture, video, photography and performance. Coal dust, soil and pigment are incorporated in to her sculptures, so that these works hold a material resonance that imbues the site to which it refers. Digital image-making processes are treated as an extended sculptural practice, as still and moving images are built up and then trimmed, carved, stretched, layered and manipulated in to a new form. Drawing and collaging processes are often used to develop ideas, responding to landscapes encountered and associated archival material researched. Newer works incorporate the body and the voice through self-representation in and with the sites inhabited, sometimes revealing narratives that seek to pull notions of gendered subjectivity towards a radical reinvention in conjunction with non-human agents.
Lauren Velvick describes Lucas’ recent practice as one that “deals with how nature is constructed, and how the concept of nature in turn constructs our political and social imaginary, with a particular focus on how gender is produced, reinforced and can be undermined through the self-representation of women within the landscape” (2023). Lucas’ material reckoning with her own subjectivity as a female artist is reflected in the landscapes she reconfigures in response to her embodied encounters with, for example, quarries, mines, grave sites and dilapidated architecture. Posthumanist and feminist theory informs this work, as does the geographic context of post-industrial Britain. As Colin Perry notes in Art Monthly (2023), the politics at play in contemporary earth works like Lucas’ is “one of empowerment or resistance”. Recent works seek to dissolve historic patriarchal power relations through the artist’s encounters and reckonings with matter, revealing new insights in relation to the material, cultural and psychological body.
Victoria Lucas was born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire in 1982 and lives and works in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. She holds a BA (Hons) Fine Art Sculpture degree from Norwich University of the Arts (2004), a MFA in Fine Art from The University of Leeds (2007) and is currently a part-time PhD Candidate in the Art, Design and Media Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. She won the SOLO award™ in 2016 and has artworks in both public and private collections across Europe and the USA. Her work appears in various publications and journals, critiqued by writers such as Stephanie Hartle (Academic and Curator, SHU), Meghan Goodeve (Curator, Freelands Foundation), Angelica Sule (Director, Film and Video Umbrella), Colin Perry (Art Monthly) and Lauren Velvick (Director, Corridor 8). She is co-founder of art collective Heavy Water with fellow artists Maud Haya-Baviera and Joanna Whittle, a project that manifests through research collaborations, exhibitions and public programme with archives, collections, museums and galleries across the UK.
Photo: Jashan Walton