Sarah Lucas - 703

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For her exhibition I SCREAM DADDIO, with which she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennial in 2015, Sarah Lucas produced, amongst other things, a host of plaster casts of eight women, friends of the artist. Each moulded from the hips downward, these body casts are presented in constellation with everyday objects: sitting on chairs, leaning on tables, bending over toilet bowls, lying on freezer chests. Two of these works can also be seen here in the exhibition: “Margot" and “Michele”, each named after the person from which the casts were made. 

Sarah Lucas describes the process of body-moulding with plaster bandages as:

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“…very direct, more or less a physical snapshot of a moment – although it takes an hour or two. It’s also a one-hit wonder. The mold can’t be used twice. So it’s a precarious business and that adds to the immediacy of the finished work. It’s a bit of an endurance test for all concerned, belied, I think, by the poetic nature of the poses struck. Literally, Power in Woman. Also grace.” 

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In the diversely moulded body openings Sarah Lucas has placed cigarettes, which can initially be read as a highly ambivalent gesture—which however, through the social, intimate production process, is above all an act of empowerment: the appropriation of space and one’s own narrative with respect to the female body. Here cigarettes become curious extensions to the body, small rebellious gestures of visualisation.