Biography
Since arriving in Australia in 2003, Scottish sculptor Lucy Irvine has established herself as an artist who interconnects craft and art genres. Exhibitions include a solo show, Mapless, at Ararat Regional Art Gallery, Sensorial Loop, the 1st Tamworth Textile Triennial (2011-13) which has toured extensively around Australia, Basketry Now, Katoomba Fine Art Gallery (2010) and Tradition and Beyond, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery (2009) both curated by Virginia Kaiser, and Common Goods, a collaborative project and exhibition held at the Melbourne Museum as part of the Commonwealth Games Festival (2006).Lucy runs workshops and programs with a sculptural and weaving focus for adults and children. In 2013 Lucy collaborated with Heide Museum of Modern Art to devise and present “Keepsake”, an educational video and downloadable resource suitable for primary teachers to use with their students, created for the new Australian Curriculum for the visual arts.
Artist statement
My work juxtaposes expansive organic forms with industrially produced, utilitarian materials, primarily nylon cord, irrigation piping and cable ties.Woven in tiny increments, each movement, each alignment, each cable tie stitch, slowly accumulates. A pattern emerges as a tessellation: always in motion, in response. The resulting sculpture articulates a tension between chaos and order or the known and as yet unknown. In this regard the process of making is not simply an articulation of ideas; it is integral to the development and realisation of those ideas.
During my post-graduate research, I established a practice that combines different forms of knowledge to articulate memory and experience of landscape: a way-finding through weaving. This way-finding led to a series of work that sought to visualise a landscape of knowledge as much as a knowledge of landscape.
Since completing my Master of Fine Art in 2010 I have gravitated towards a more textile-based discourse to orientate my practice. Within this context, nuances of surface, skin, process and form can be readily understood as one entity.
As the woven skin of my sculpture becomes increasingly complex, the definitions of space, volume and line become unfixed. So too, do the boundaries between the intuitive and the analytical in the making become increasingly blurred.
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