Artist Statement
A transformatory car accident as a teenager left me with an indelible impression of expanded time and space. Dislodged from everyday linear time, something magical occurred — I recognised reality as unfathomably complex and mysterious.
Years later, a curiosity about plant medicine and indigeneity led me to a commission at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve (To the Land, 2015). I developed a spoken word text exploring the nature of soil and our relationship to the underworld - the under that is under our feet. The poetic language of the text invites a listener to experience invisible layers of the world around them and to connect to their own hidden interior.
Shortly afterwards I discovered Nan Shepherd’s gorgeously transcendent work The Living Mountain, written in response to the Cairngorm Mountains near her home in Scotland. The precision of her felt experience inspired my Super16mm film How the Earth Must See Itself (2019) which invites the viewer into a sensual connection with the world via its sound and image.
Cultivating unconventional forms of collaboration & shared authorship with other artists, elders, experts, children & more-than-humans; each of my works instigates a different process of listening & attending, unlearning & uncovering to form a kind of net for the invisible and the overlooked.
An Arts Council Funded, DYCP grant (2025/6) is allowing me to explore extraordinary human-equine relationships and develop new work that creates space for the equisite urgency of sustaining and cultivating our ability to connect with one another and the world around us.
Find my projects here and here. And current / upcoming events are in calendar.
About
Lucy Cash is a UK-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher and curator, working through and across performance, film, installation and writing.
After studying theatre and dance, she worked as a performer and maker of live art and site-specific visual theatre. Teaching herself skills in film and video, she worked with renowned USA-based performance company - Goat Island. Collaborating with director, Lin Hixson, she created interactive video for a performance at Venice Biennale (2005), as well as four moving image works screened internationally in both galleries and festivals. More choreographies for screen resulted in a fellowship from South East Dance to expand choreographic thinking. Lucy used the fellowship to invite four other artists to co-curate a choreographed exhbition - What if (2010) at Siobhan Davies Studios.
As an associate artist with Goat Island (2001 - 9) she recognised the ways in which collaborative processes enable powerful human connection and she expanded her practice to include work as a socially engaged artist. Projects have included commissions as educational artist in residence at Whitechapel Gallery; An Up Projects, year-long residency in Nine Elms, London; and a research residency at Foundling Museum.
Lucy has presented films and installations at institutions 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, Siobhan Davies Studios, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Natural History Museum.
Her work increasingly focuses on de-centering humans to better explore the fragile ecologies of human >< more-than-human relationships and her 2019 film How the World Must See Itself (A Thirling) was nominated for the Scottish Short Film Award.
A first-generation university student, she holds an MA in Contemporary Performance Practice (Lancaster) and an MLitt in Creative Writing (Glasgow) and in 2025 she became a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, UK.
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/
