Culture

Sarah Lucas was a central figure among the wave of young British artists (YBAs), such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who took the international art world by storm in the Nineties. Lucas is an artist whose practice spans from photography, sculpture and installation. Her works are confrontational, humourous and thought-provoking. Invited to New Zealand this year for the first time as part of Two Rooms residency in Auckland, Lucas produced an exhibition entitled NUDS, donating proceeds from the first NUDS sculpture to the Christchurch Earthquake appeal.
 
Lucas has created a new body of work, NZU SPIRIT OF EWE, which brings together two separate bodies of work from her exhibition at the Two Rooms. NZU SPIRIT OF EWE can be linked to the gender-orientated works that Lucas produced in the Nineties. The twisted, sexual, yet ungendered biomorphic forms in Pepsi and Coki (2009) are reminiscent of the work of seminal female artist Louise Bourgeois. Yet each image retains a primitivism which could be likened to the abstractive formality of British sculptors such as Henry Moore. Pepsi and Coki consists of a series of photographs featuring an array of stuffed stockings, erotically intersecting. The distorted forms have an immersive quality that both repels yet intrigues the eye in a captivated crescendo of dynamic energy. The otherworldly figures are unnerving, yet somehow incite a sense of eroticism.
 
Responding to the dark and desolate New Zealand landscape, Lucas produced The Spirit of Ewe (2011) and Enjoy God (2011), masterfully touching upon the darker aspects of New Zealand's physical and psychological landscape. The Spirit of Ewe is characterised by humourous lightness, as though Lucas is poking fun of the 'New Zealand farmer alone with his sheep' stereotype. The work consists of a set of stacked concrete bricks with stuffed nylon stuffed tights resembling female breasts and a sheep skull and teeth arranged as female genitalia. Presenting the female body via the skeletal fragments of a sheep could be seen as misogynistic. However, its somewhat shocking appearance retains a humour also apparent in Lucas’ previous work.