LADY LUCY UNWANTED GIFT
FIVE YEARS unit 2B1 Boothby Road, Archway, London N194AJ
PREVIEW: Friday 12th January 6 – 9 PM
OPEN: Sat Sun 13th 14th January 12 – 6 PM
ARTIST in CONVERSATION with PAUL CLINTON Sat 13th Jan at 2 PM
http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/321/Lady_Lucy/321.html
UNWANTED GIFT
Stock cubes, condoms, I phones, chocolates, antidepressants, asthma inhalers, tea, dates, painkillers,
satsumas, tomatoes, ice cream, granola, biscuits.
The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty stricken, that is, to the individual who
lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the sombre indifference
of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on
the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a military exploitation, a religious
mystification and a capitalist misappropriation henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth,
the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splendour of rags and the sombre challenge of
indifference. One might say, finally, that the lie destines life’s exuberance to revolt.
Bataille,The Accursed Share.
Exuberance is beauty
William Blake
Artist Bio
Dr Lucy Woollett, also known as Lady Lucy – makes paintings, drawings and moving images. Her work is
strongly informed by her interest in the social function and value of her activities as an artist and more
specifically as a painter. She seeks to find meaning and political application in painting and draws on the
art historical lineages of collaborative art practice and portraiture. Studio works are concerned with the
editing of imagery sourced from the second-hand printed page or the imagination. Taking an economic
approach to scale, the work is made in series, applying processes of painting, layering, abstraction,
refiguring, and the juxtaposing of multiple pictorial references where ideas merge through collage. In
other works, fanciful forms appear, which are dreamt from the imaginary or channel a recent happening
from real life, the screen or radio. The characterful and colourful works often include secondhand fabric
items, and they are only finished when someone, something or someplace real or imagined appears.
Woollett has recently completed her first permanent public commission Foundation of Kindness, Shared
Experience, Shared Burden, a composite group portrait painting made in partipation with staff from The
Critical Care Unit at Royal Marsden hospital, Chelsea (2023) Portraits for Services, Gifts and Favours,
Museum of London (2017), Shrine to Dissent, Day of The Dead Festival, Bargehouse, London (2014),
The Whitechapel Gallery Staff Portrait Studio (2011) and Volunteers, Festival of Britain Southbank Centre
(2011).
Woollett completed her practice-based PhD at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton in
2022 an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea (2008) and BA Fine Art at University of Plymouth (1996)
Her research investigates how the process of portrait-making can function as a socially engaged practice,
and ideas around art as gift, as means of post-capitalist exchange.
Speaker bio : Paul Clinton
Paul Clinton is a writer, curator and editor based in London, UK. He was the 2019-21 Royal Academy
Fellow in Criticism, Royal Academy Schools, London.
For four years he was a senior editor at the international art and culture magazines Frieze and Frieze
Masters, before leaving to work as a writer and take up the post of lecturer in curating at Goldsmiths. His
writing has appeared in magazines such as Frieze, the London Review of Books, MOUSSE, Art Monthly,
Art Review and The White Review. Articles include on the artists Gustav Metzger, Cosey Fanni Tutti,
David Goldblatt and Terry Richardson, the queer theorist Didier Eribon and on topics as diverse as class
in the art world, solidarity in activism, and the philosophy of Pierre Klossowski.
FIVE YEARS unit 2B1 Boothby Road, Archway, London N194AJ
http://www.fiveyears.org,uk
