Field Essays presents: LucyandBart

Field Essays is happy to announce its protagonists for the upcoming issue:  the Eindhoven-based design duo Lucyandbart (NL/AU). Sometimes it just takes one image to know you want to work with somebody. That’s what happened with Grow on you (image) when I saw it.

By suggesting as much as it eludes, Grow on you treads the thin line between “no extra” (a Breema principle in Thai massage practice) and “what if”. It’s a thin line, which is hard to walk on in practice. To me, “no extra” means: letting the material and the form do what they want to do. You could also describe this mode of operation as “listening to the material” – a phrase coined by artist Maria Blaisse in relation to her thirty year long explorations of form. “What if” means: helping the imaginary potential of the same material to generate meaning.

***
“Lucyandbart” is a collaboration between artists Lucy McRae (AU) and Bart Hess (NL). They imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.