SAM LUCAS & JULIA OLANDERS
TAKE CUES FROM THE HUMAN BODY FOR THEIR UNUSUAL FORMS
Artist and designer Sam Lucas creates ambiguous forms that explore the weighty and sometimes awkward experience of the human body. Certainly not devoid of humour and joy, Lucas’s strange sculptures are built on observations of her own lived experiences and notions she develops of how others experience flesh.
PHOTO - Sylvain Deleu
“Growing up with close family members with complex needs and neurodiversity from a young age made me aware displacement is not only geographical but can be within one’s own skin, this has been cemented by working with people with complex needs for over 20 years”
PHOTO - Sylvain Deleu
The pieces are partially deliberate and partially an organic process where the material itself determines its shape as it folds and collapses. The combination leaves the final sculptures with a subtle honesty; a tribute to the collaboration between substance and artist. In keeping this tension in her work Lucas puts aside the need “to perfect” any piece.
PHOTO - Sylvain Deleu
“I do not always know who they [the sculptures] are at first, as they come from deep within my psyche. It is from spending time with them that they sometimes reveal themselves to me, laughing with or at me,” says Lucas.
“Sometimes the concepts in my work can feel quite dark and ominous, so playfulness can twist the meaning and then the colour and humour can invite, attract or intrigue the viewer rather than repel them.”
Parts of the work are covered with a glossy slip, while other sections are left with the raw texture of clay.
The contrasting colour tones also create an emotional tension between the skin-like natural clay against the saccharine yellow, oranges and pinks
Born into a creative house, Lucas spent her childhood watching her mother make dresses for bourgeois ladies who occupied expensive houses.
“The spirit of making is something I have taken from my early experiences of this industrious hive of activity.”
PHOTO - Sylvain Deleu
Instead of the threads and sewing machines that enabled her mother to create, Lucas gravitated towards the weight and warmth of clay. She found that clay more closely mirrored her own human body than textiles.
“I began working in clay as a troubled young person and I found sanctuary in the art and ceramics rooms away from the academic pressure and social awkwardness.”
“The nature of clay and its malleability lends itself to being a therapeutic medium. It allows you to work in a more fluid, intuitive way rather than prescriptive as so many of the contradictory demands for certainty today in a world of uncertainty.”
Around certain pieces Lucas ties a red textile, its warmth contrasting to the nakedness of the clay. It at once conveys a sense of restriction and comfort.
“it has been a really difficult year for me, spending too much in my own head and over thinking everything. I felt imprisoned and as a result my creativity felt imprisoned, trapped, but then I chose to make work about that experience.”
Stockholm-based design Julia Olanders makes bizarre – almost horrifying (bear with us, we’ll elaborate on why) – vessels from plaster, insulation foam and concrete.
The vessels that form part of Cluster’s online exhibition and shop are part of Olanders’ collection Betweenness, which explores things that exist in spaces between and that are hard to define.
Though they vary in size, the basic shape of the pieces in Betweenness echoes that of traditional Green urns, made with fabric moulds. Their bulging bellies and thin necks at once caricature a human figure and remind us of the ideals of beauty that these ancient urns represented.
Olanders choice of materials forces her audience to question whether toxic matter can become ornamental, even pretty, in the hands of an artist.
“The vessels are like bodies stripped from their revealing skin, a fleshy equivalent of the antique statue,” says Olanders. “The results are uncanny evocations of human bodies. Jarring bursts of insulation foam add an extra element, oozing from their shells like some malignant plague of tumours.”
As with Lucas’s sculptures, there is visible complicity between the will and spontaneity of the materials and the agenda of the artist. Olanders leaves the foam to bubble and form its own peculiar shapes, leaving the end piece with an element of the accidental.
“There is just something magical with objects that are unique, where one thing can never be the same as the other,” says Olanders. “I love unpredictable processes.”
The play on the idealised shapes of Greek art, and the perfection that Greek artists intended to capture counter the imperfect and humanness we see in shapes that mirror the body. This is exaggerated by Olanders’ use of fleshy tones, like those of Concrete Vessel. She admits that her work is intentionally unsettling.
“[I want to trigger] curiosity, and that uncanny feeling of not being able to decide if you like what you see, or if you find it disgusting.”
Pieces by both Julia Olanders and Sam Lucas can be found on the Cluster Shop pages.
Thank you for reading,
Katie De Klee & Cluster Team.