Artist Statement
My practice investigates how movement, attention and relation unexpectedly shape how we perceive and experience the world. It works across performance, moving image, writing and curating to explore how perception is produced through bodies, images, language and environments.
As a teenager, a serious car accident disrupted my experience of linear time. Dislodged from linear time, something magical occurred — I recognised reality as unfathomably complex and mysterious. What emerged from that moment was not a fixed narrative, but a sustained attentiveness to how reality can shift — how time can dilate, fragment and reassemble itself through perception. This remains a quiet undercurrent in my work: an attention to instability as a generative condition.
Across performance, moving image, writing and curating, I work with expanded choreography as a way of thinking through how movement operates beyond the body — across images, language, environments and more-than-human relations.
I develop collaborative and often cross-species approaches to making, working with artists, communities, researchers and more-than-human systems to explore how knowledge is produced through shared attention and situated encounter. My cinematography is tactile and attentive to duration; my work with sound often sits at the threshold between composition and environment. Across all forms, movement is not a subject but a method — a way of thinking through how perception is continuously composed.
Recent research, supported by an Arts Council DYCP grant, explores human–equine relational systems, attending to the complexities, agencies and forms of communication that emerge within interspecies encounter.
Find my projects here and here. And current / upcoming events are in calendar
About
Lucy is a UK-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher and curator working across performance, moving image, writing and curatorial practice. Her work explores expanded choreography as a way of understanding how movement, perception and relation are produced across bodies, images, language and environments.
After studying theatre and dance, she began working in live art and site-responsive performance before teaching herself film and video practices. This led to a long-term collaboration with the US-based performance company Goat Island, where she worked as an associate artist (2001–2009). During this period she collaborated with director Lin Hixson on interactive video for a performance at the Venice Biennale (2005), and developed a series of S16mm moving image works screened internationally in galleries and festivals. These works marked an ongoing shift in her practice toward film as a choreographic system rather than performance documentation.
A fellowship from South East Dance supported the development of her expanded curatorial and choreographic thinking, leading to the co-curation of What if… (2010) at Siobhan Davies Studios — a choreographed exhibition bringing together artists working across performance, film and live art.
Her socially engaged practice has developed through residencies and commissions including Whitechapel Gallery, Up Projects (Nine Elms), and the Foundling Museum, where she has worked with communities through collaborative, process-led approaches to making.
Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including HZT and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery (Lahore), Bonington Gallery (Nottingham), Tramway (Glasgow), and in London at Tate Modern, Siobhan Davies Studios, Whitechapel Gallery and the Natural History Museum.
Increasingly, her research considers how human and more-than-human relations are shaped through fragile, interdependent systems of ecology, attention and perception. Her film How the World Must See Itself (A Thirling) (2019) was nominated for the Scottish Short Film Award.
A first-generation university student, she holds an MA in Contemporary Performance Practice (Lancaster University) and an MLitt in Creative Writing (University of Glasgow). In 2025 she became a resident at the Pervasive Media Studio, 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/
