About
Lucy is an interdisciplinary artist working across moving image, sound, installation and participatory practice. Her work is expansive and stirred by her background in performance and her ongoing practice in somatic movement. Her most recent work blurs the boundaries between living things, revealing interdependencies and applying choreographic approaches to feeling and sensing what lies beneath the surface of things.
Between 2001 and 2009 she was an associate artist with performance company, Goat Island (USA) collaborating with director Lin Hixson to develop a series of S16mm performance films screened internationally, and later collected into a DVD publication held in university and institutional collections worldwide. After receiving a fellowship from South East Dance (2009) her practice expanded into curatorial and socially engaged forms, including the curation of What if… (2010) and What Matters (2012) at Siobhan Davies Studios, and an AIR education residency at Whitechapel Gallery (2012-2013). As well as commissions from organisations including Nomad Projects (2015) and Dance Umbrella (2012, 2013) and a research residency at the Foundling Museum (2014).
Her work has been presented internationally at venues including HZT and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery (Lahore), CID au Grand Hornu (Belgium), Bonington Gallery (Nottingham), Tramway (Glasgow), and in London at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and the Natural History Museum as well as on BBC 2 and Channel4. In 2025 she joined the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, as a resident artist.
Artist Statement
Can soil show us a more tender way to live? What kind of dance is a library? How do horses make time?
My work begins begins by pushing and pulling at words, exploring their material presence as tiny splinters of meaning which under pressure shift from the familiar to something stranger. Through acts of attention, observation and encounter the work then moves between performance, fiction and forms of speculative storytelling inviting a sensorial, embodied experience. I’m drawn to moments where the boundaries between these modes become uncertain and produce something unexpected - when a body seems to know something before the mind does.
How does time accumulate? How can a gesture carry centuries of practice; a house hold generations of relationships; a piece of stone history far older than the people who live beside it? Beginning with something ordinary and familiar, I create interruptions and shifts of rhythm that makes other temporalities perceptible.
I’m interested in cinema as a way of making these latent worlds felt rather than explained. I invite image and sound to retain some mystery—to allow different ways of knowing and forms of life to exist alongside one another mirroring the ways in which people, places and materials become entangled through movement, perception and ecological relations.
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/
