Freelands Artists Programme

Current: Victoria Lucas has been awarded a two-year Platform20 Art Residency at Site Gallery in Sheffield, which forms part of the Freelands Artists Programme funded by The Freelands Foundation, London. The residency will continue until April 2022.

https://freelandsfoundation.co.uk/institution/site-gallery

The Hepworth Wakefield Installation

Upcoming: Saturday 7th August 2021, 10am - 4pm. Free, book here.

In Victoria Lucas’ audio installation The Search, the artist and her two sisters work to replicate the sound of their mother’s laugh, a sound that, at the time of making, they had not heard for seven years since her death. Through their own inherited voices, they repeatedly search for the correct sequence of sounds in order to replicate what now only exists as a faded memory. 

The Search was created in response to Barbara Hepworth’s Mother and Child (1934) and was first staged at The Hepworth Wakefield as part of The Swap, an exchange project between The Hepworth Wakefield and Westgate Studios, in 2010. We are delighted to re-present an updated version of this work, which will be installed close to, and in dialogue with, Hepworth’s Mother and Child.  

The Search will be played on a continual loop throughout the day.

Site Gallery Exhibition

Upcoming: Platform 20 (July 2021) features five Sheffield based artists: James Clarkson, Maud Haya-Bavièra, Victoria Lucas, Conor Rogers and Joanna Whittle and presents a fascinating insight into the artists’ work-in-progress developed during their two-year residency with Sheffield’s visual arts organisations.

Platform is an established artistic development programme at Site Gallery which allows artists to explore new ideas in a public space, testing new thinking and research with engaged audiences. For this edition, the exhibition will be presented at Site Gallery, Yorkshire Artspace and Bloc Projects.

The artists began their residencies in 2019 and are five of twenty from the Sheffield City Region, taking part in a rolling five-year initiative funded through the Freelands Artists Programme. Each artist receives a two-year paid residency which includes investment in professional development, production as well as opportunities to exhibit.

Threshold Exhibition

Upcoming: 12 June - 10 July 2021. Open daily. Opening event 12 June 2021, book here to attend.

Lucas has produced a new series of sculptures that work with the materiality of photographic imagery, and the aesthetics and utopian vision of billboards, to de-construct and reform an old rural quarry and in the urban landscape of Burley, Leeds.

Lucas has been visiting and responding to the quarry for the last two years. An enclosed, hidden world that is carved into the bedrock in Derbyshire, the quarry has become a site that Lucas has regularly worked using video, sound, sculpture and performance. Lucas uses technology to remap, embody and entangle the material strata of landscapes, a process in which female subjectivity is reimagined and reclaimed in place.

No longer in use, and overgrown by the matriarchal mosses and other vegetation, The Strata of Things transports fragments of this quarry to Threshold. A reminder that the fabric of the red brick and stone houses in Leeds, originates from the earth. Engaging with the quarry as a site of extraction, The Strata of Things has formed through a process of digital and physical manipulation of material and images. The laboured repetition of cutting into the imagery has become a re-creation of the act of carving into rock, or the building up of sediment throughout the slow time of stone.