Artist Statement

How does a library move? Can soil shows us a more tender way to live? What can horses teach us about empathy? Is a name a pattern?

My work invites you to feel: to breathe in or spit out. To feel soothed or provoked; to alter state, or shift timescale. To be touched. It remembers forgotten histories; seasons that change unpredictably; soil that suddenly departs or arrives; patterns that connect the unexpected, the unnameable.

Time, energy and attention are its materials. They appear in film / video, writing, performance and installation which takes place in books, galleries, museums, libraries, housing estates; on water and in the air.

Cultivating unconventional forms of collaboration and shared authorship with other artists, elders, experts, children, more-than-humans; each work, each context, each collaboration instigates a different process of listening and attending, unlearning and uncovering. Every process has its rhythms, practices, repetitions; responses to thought and experience, light and weather. All this makes a kind of net for the invisible, for the often overlooked.

If we tend the net honestly, relentlessly; with care, it becomes a magic portal for the unheard; for the unimagined, for lightness as well as gravity; catharsis as well as poetry.

Find my projects here and here. And current / upcoming events are in calendar.

About

Lucy Cash is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator.

A first-generation university student, she holds an MA in Contemporary Performance Practice (Lancaster) and an MLitt in Creative Writing (Glasgow).

Alongside a twenty-five-year art practice, she has worked as a life model, a cinema usher, an inspector of aeroplane parts and in a Royal Mail sorting office. These various vocations have proved invaluable for working in broadcast media and as a university educator. It all informs her work as a multi-disciplinary artist.

Filmmaking skills have been honed working for independent film & TV production companies as researcher, script-editor, edit assistant and assistant director. She developed and directed experimental radio ideas at BBC Radio drama. Her approach to collaborative practice is shaped by her role as associate member of Chicago-based performance group, Goat Island (2001- 2009). With Goat Island she collaborated on writing projects, created video as part of their performance work, When Will the September Roses Bloom / Last Night Was Only A Comedy (Venice Biennale, 2005) and created four internationally exhibited moving-image works.

Lucy’s moving-image works and installations have been exhibited in international contexts 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 in London at Dilston Grove, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Natural History Museum. She was the inaugural artist in residence at Foundling Museum, London; has been an educational artist in residence for Whitechapel Gallery; has received a fellowship from South East Dance for her work making screen choreographies and five of her short films have been broadcast on Ch4 / BBC2. Funding and commissions she’s received include Creative Scotland; ACE; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; National Theatre of Scotland; Opera Estate Festival (Italy); Akram Khan Company; Wandsworth Festival; Retina Dance; DECODA; Rajni Shah Projects; Siobhan Davies Dance; Independent Dance, Random Acts.

Her work increasingly focuses on de-centering humans to better explore the fragile ecologies of human >< more-than-human relationships.

In 2025 Lucy became a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, UK. 

The Studio is a creative technologies collaboration with Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol.

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/