Lucy Skaer: Exit, Voice and Loyalty

<p>In this episode Lucy Skaer discuss her solo exhibition <em>Exit, Voice and Loyalty</em> with Tramway curator Claire Jackson.</p> <p>For her most ambitious solo exhibition in the UK since the Turner prize in 2009, Lucy Skaer presents a new body of work spanning ceramics, film, litho and wood-cut prints and sculpture. <em>Exit, Voice and Loyalty</em> takes its title from economist Albert O. Hirschman’s essay on how change comes about through dissent. Although not directly linked to the book, Skaer is interested in how economics provides a shifting representation of the materials world, and how this idea can be related to sculpture.</p> <p>Using a diverse array of materials both mass-produced and handcrafted, the exhibition presents various overlapping orders of time and memory, the historic and the domestic. Many of the works allude to a time outside of our direct frame of reference, incorporating archaic processes and ancient objects; rare hard woods and precious metals sit alongside the worn stone steps from the house where the artist grew up.</p> <p>A number of forms within the exhibition are based on real objects which Skaer has transformed using highly elaborate and skilled, manual / handcrafted processes including glazing, printing, carving, bronze smelting, litho and wood cut printing. As such, Skaer abstracts such real objects into sculptural forms and symbols, removing them from their original context and scrambling and unpicking their narrative associations. In doing so she reveals their intrinsic material nature and the ways in which language, meaning and value migrate over time…</p>