Lucy Gregory

Location: London
Education: The Ruskin School of Art & The Royal College of Art

Biography
Lucy Gregory (b. London, 1994) graduated from The Ruskin School of Art, 2016 and The Royal College of Art, Sculpture, 2018. Exploring the theatricality of flatness, she creates large-scale ‘kinetic collages’ that rely on audience participation to activate surreal mechanisms. Her sculptural environments play with a collision between bodies and machines to create the feeling you are walking into an animation – referencing the body and its flexible instability flattened on screen, and the often violent slapstick humour of cartoons. Lucy won the Ingram Prize and her work is now part of the Ingram Collection. She received the Gilbert Bayes Trust Studio Grant and the RCA Arts & Humanities Art Criticism Prize, and has been shortlisted for this year’s National Sculpture Prize to realise a large- scale outdoor sculpture. She was awarded solo exhibition at Boomer Gallery 2021 and recently exhibited at Bold Tendencies, Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, MK Gallery and The Lightbox Gallery.

Submitted work

Title: The Blame Game

About the work
The Blame Game is an interactive, kinetic sculpture inspired by political agendas of recent times. Pendulums are set in motion and cartoon-like fingers satirically mock each other with slapstick, exaggerated finger wags. They blame each other, swinging with their own rhythm and momentum, pointing across the space in different directions with no obvious resolution. 'The new normal' throws a spotlight onto inner workings of the political system, disparities between ‘us’ and ‘them’, in and out, rule makers and breakers. The network of blame cast across the landscape is a mechanism to escape accountability, shifting instead to demographics, institutions, industries - and resultantly, we move forward with a mistrust of the system. The use of mirrors and methods of audience participation within the sculpture are deliberately employed as a way to put the viewer in the centre of the work - people affected by the web of blame and decisions now have a chance to become the puppeteer.