Victoria Lucas

Victoria Lucas' practice comprises many forms of art making. From video installation to facilitating exhibitions, each thread of production is consistent in conceptual motivation. Lucas often utilises the location selected, creating both artworks and group exhibitions within varying contexts. Exploring the relationship between photography, film, and temporality, her work investigates the physical nature of these media, in relation to both the imagery presented and the context in which it is constructed.

Recording time through the medium of photography and video allows the audience to participate in another subject’s mortality. As time dissolves relentlessly the photograph and the moving image extracts and archives a moment, immortalising the subject by digitally capturing and storing them. A photograph instantly becomes past tense after the shutter is triggered, the frozen image representing an event consisting of just one fixed frame. In contrast, the isolated moments depicted through the medium of the moving image exists in suspended animation; constantly present at the touch of a button, continuously melting frame by frame. Lucas examines objects, places and moments that reinforce the ephemeral nature of actuality against the passage of time. Disused buildings, stored furniture, and obsolete machinery have all featured in previous works.

Stills marks a significant development in Lucas’ practice, away from the purely site-specific format present in previous works, to a more self-sustainable configuration that can respond to a number of different environments independently. Although the direct relationship between real space and digital space is something that is still being developed in current investigations, it is the physical nature of both the moving image and photography, in relation to the concept of temporality that Lucas presently examines. These self contained works include mediums such as sculpture, photography, video and installation, all pieces relating to the lens as a way to view and document varying experiences and moments.

Lucas often researches to find suitable situations in which to exhibit independently from gallery institutions, creating exhibitions that will provide an alternative environment for selected artists to install works. Situations was a curated project that Lucas facilitated with colleague Andy Broadey, and was based in a disused factory space in Holbeck, Leeds. The exhibition considered the way in which we as a society engage with our environment, and how these experiences can be projected back in to it as art. Lucas created a site-specific installation for the exhibition alongside Broadey and seven other artists, who were selected to participate alongside the curators.

The artist’s book is another technique employed by Lucas. Similarly, these hand-bound books archive places and objects that are specific to the notion of time continuum. Consisting of photography, scanned images and text, her books present collections of subject matter in a way that draws attention to individual categories through their function, history and cultural references.Some of the books can be found in special collections across the UK, including in the Brotherton Library Leeds, Leeds College of Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Tate Britain. The works have also been exhibited within group and solo shows in various spaces across Europe, America, and Mexico.