Heavy Water is an artist collective that draws from archives and collections to create artworks that reclaim narratives in a contemporary context. The project manifests through research collaborations, exhibitions and public programme with selected archives, collections, museums and galleries. 

This exhibition, curated by artist Victoria Lucas, is centred around JMW Turner’s painting The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon. PostNatures sees Lucas draw on the constructed composition of Turner’s painting to highlight how imaginary subjects can affect our individual or cultural perceptions of reality.

Reclamation Ground: A Material Reckoning with Female Subjectivity through Site-Responsive Art Practice is the title of Victoria Lucas’ PhD research, which she is currently undertaking part-time at Sheffield Hallam University.

A research residency in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of Italy took Lucas to a number of industrial and post-industrial sites, including the Pittini Steel Works in Osoppo, Udine and the old Raibl Mines in Tarvisio.

The Freelands Artist Programme was created to support and enhance collaboration between 80 emerging artists and four arts organisations from across the UK, to build and strengthen professional arts practice outside of London.

With a focus on myth, gender and facets of the self, this art residency and exhibition programme re-inhabited and re-animated the empty rooms, spaces and grounds of the Grade II listed Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate.

Lay of the Land (and other such myths) is an shapeshifting installation in which radical representations of women control their own space, and their own bodies, on their own terms. The project responds to a month-long art residency in California, USA.

Over an 18-month period in 2013 and 2014 the National Portrait Gallery led a creative participation project entitled ‘National Memory – Local Stories’, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Victoria Lucas was commissioned to create a video work in response to the Redbridge Museum’s World War I collection and the National Portrait Gallery’s archive.

A neon commission for the Wildness Between the Lines exhibition at Leeds University of the Arts, curated by Nick Cass. The exhibition comprised contemporary interpretations of works by the Brontë sisters.

The relationship between place, archive and memory was explored by artists Flis Holland and Victoria Lucas in April 2014 at Vapaan Taiteen Tila, a subterranean ex-bunker in Helsinki, Finland.

This curatorial project was framed in the broader context of an international exchange that explores an ongoing discourse around deadpan aesthetics and deadpan humour. This project, devised and initiated by Heidi Hove and Jonn Herschend, can be likened to a sort of deadpan relay, as artists from one country are invited to respond to artworks made by artists from another.

A year-long public artwork by collaborators Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater.