Lucy James, bird girl flappin' and squawkin', 2012, collage on paper, 42 x 32cm
Armed with a medical scalpel and a keen eye, Lucy James harvests images from discarded and forgotten books and melds them into carefully composed hybrids of form and meaning. Often floating on vast spaces of empty white, her works evoke a sense of fantasy emerging from the vast expanse of our collective imagination.
Animals, plants and humans morph into and out of each other. Masses of collected and catalogued natural species burst and explode, and laser beams shoot rainbows out of the dead eyes of history. Touching on issues of inherited folklore, the commodification of pets and the exploitation of natural resources, her work appears playful and visually dynamic, while allowing for deeper interpretation.
after the end is a series of collages that explore notions of fantasy, hybridisation and the interaction of nature and objects. Her series of works conflates the boundaries between the manufactured objects of machinery and the manipulated elements of nature, exploring the historical consequences of our engagement with them.
