Lucy Cash is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice integrates mixed media installations, moving-image works, collaborative performance, and writing. Rooted in a background in performance and choreography, her work navigates and expands the familiar towards the surreal and poetic often blending diverse methodologies and disciplines to create complex, multi-layered narratives.
Since 2015 her work has increasingly focused on decentering the human to better explore the fragile ecologies of human >< more-than-human.
From 2005 to 2009, Cash was an associate member of the USA-based Goat Island performance collective, where she contributed to the creation of four internationally exhibited moving-image works. In 2010, her choreographies for screen earned her a fellowship from South East Dance, further deepening her exploration of how visual, performative, and conceptual languages can converge.
Cash’s single-screen films have received widespread recognition, with broadcasts on BBC2, BBC4, and Channel 4. Her works include Requiem For The Redhead?, a special commission for the centenary of Darwin’s Origin of the Species; Einstein and the Honey Bee, an animated film shortlisted for the New Zealand Environmental Film Award; Sight Reading (redux), longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2016; We Shall Trip the Light Fantastic, a Random Acts commission for Channel 4 (2016); and How The Earth Must See Itself, a National Theatre of Scotland commission, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Scottish Short Film Award.
Her moving-image installations have been showcased in leading international galleries, including HZT and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Zahoor ul Akhal Gallery (Lahore), Bonington Gallery (Nottingham), Tramway (Glasgow), and major venues in London such as Dilston Grove, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Natural History Museum.
In addition to her creative practice, Cash is committed to curating, mentoring, and practice-based teaching, engaging with both academic and public contexts to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and creative development.
Artist Statement
Lucy’s work is relational, often involving social exchange, unconventional forms of collaboration and unpredictable alignments that reveal the overlooked or forgotten. It has taken place in galleries, museums, libraries, housing estates, on water and in the air.
She engages choreographic processes to explore how we relate to one another - as humans, and as bodies that connect to other-than-human elements of the world.
Her interests lie in poesis and poetic forms; choreographic practices, and innovative forms of hosting, care & curation.
In previous works she has asked, ‘how does a library move?’ creating sound installations and temporary site-specific sculptures for a library in London; explored the act of singing as a gesture of solidarity, harmony and strength with communities in Nine Elms, London; investigated acts of naming in a research residency at the Foundling Museum; delved into the process of how we see for a year-long educational residency with Whitechapel Gallery and co-created a week of daily performances for the OperaEstate in Bassano, Italy.
Lucy is regularly engaged in research, curation, and teaching. She creates courses and leads workshops in all kinds of formal and informal educational settings.
Interviews
improvisation and filmmaking interview: www.improfilmclub.com/podcast
HZT Berlin Open lecture: vimeo.com/114796402
Whitechapel Artists in Residence interview: vimeo.com/76974193
Dance-tech TV interview: dance-tech.tv/videos/what-matters-festival-2012-becky-edmunds-lucy-cash-london-uk/
