Recess | Lucy Andrews at Artlink Fort Dunree
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Lucy Andrews’ work takes the form of sculptures and site-specific installations. She explores the point at which cultural and natural systems meet, and then collapse, in the transition between organic and inorganic, raw and processed, living and dead. Her work communicates a sense of contingency, through forms that are fluid and amorphous. It yields to its architectural support and to the passage of time. Recently she has been working with dust, soot, rocks, plastic, silicone, water, bitumen and aluminium. These materials are combined and transformed to produce dynamic arrangements in which their fundamental nature, as well as the idea of nature, is tested. Following her residency at the end of 2019, Lucy Andrews returns to Fort Dunree to present a site-responsive exhibition Recess. The title is used to refer to both a temporal interruption and to an architectural cavity. Throughout this body of work, a feeling of absence is reflected in voids and volumes; subtle displacements of matter creating changes in atmosphere. The exhibition draws on the idea of the ruin as a manifestation of the passage of time and a decline of order, on the apocalyptic atmosphere of the site and its long- term processes of decay. Andrews’ work also reflects on the more recent slowing in human activity as a precursor to a ‘world without us ‘[1] – allowing other, smaller lifeforms to assert themselves. The artist has boarded up all the windows of the main gallery building with plywood panels, onto which she has carved the patterns of woodworm exit holes. Upon entering the darkened room, these marks appear as tiny apertures of light leaking through the wood. Scattered on the floor are piles of concrete, embedded with the fossilised forms of various eating and drinking vessels. A series of antiquated aluminium cans (found under the floorboards of the old military buildings) are displayed in such a way as to reveal a slow process of erasure. Their specificity as artefacts gradually giving way to a raw materiality. The Dirt drawings are large membranes made from liquid silicone that was poured onto and peeled away from various patches of ground, extracting and displacing a layer of the earth’s surface. The works have a bodily presence, like a skin discarded by something living. “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.”[2] [1] Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007), Map
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