TRACES: Sarah Lucas

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Sarah Lucas (23/10/1962- ), her practice is characterized by irreverent humour and the creation of visual puns and vulgar euphemisms. Spanning sculpture, photography, and installation, her work evokes the body in its physical, cultural, and psychic dimensions. In her compositions, Lucas often uses everyday objects as a substitute for the human body: furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, and cigarettes are usually coupled with slang and crude genital innuendo.Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

The third of four siblings, Sarah Lucas was born in 1962. Her father was a milkman and her mother was a cleaner and part-time gardener. Lucas was a self-proclaimed tomboy, playing out on the street with local children (mostly boys), learning to swear without really understanding what the swearwords meant. Lucas has said that her mother wouldn’t allow her to do any homework on the thinking that the time she spent at school should be enough of an education. She left school at 16 with no qualifications, stating that she “bummed around for a couple of years” and survived on part time jobs and unemployment benefit. Reacting to an abortion at 17, Lucas hitchhiked around Europe for a year with a boyfriend while trying to work out what she would like to do with her life. On her return, her mother got her a job in a play centre where she was working. Once there, she spoke with a colleague who had gone to art college and she realised that this was path she might follow. Having attended the Working Men’s College in 1982, Lucas put together a portfolio which secured her a place on a foundation course at the London College of Printing in 1983. As a fine Art undergraduate, she studied at Goldsmith College between 1984 and 1987 where she met many fellow artists who would form the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, including Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Gillian Wearing and Gary Hume. She entered into personal relationships with Hume and Fairhurst, the latter ending in a tragedy that would affect Lucas’s outlook on life. Following her graduation, she contributed to Hirst’s famous Freeze exhibition in a London Port Authority Building in Docklands. Many of the artists showing at Freeze became associated with the YBAs whose work was promoted by advertising guru and art collector Charles Saatchi. In 1990 Lucas met art director Sadie Coles, who was at that time working for the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, and would later represent Lucas through her own commercial gallery in London. At this time Lucas became strongly influenced by the writing of Dworkin and her radical feminist position on patriarchy: attacking the dominance of “blokey” art that she believed was “actually a construct”. Her sculpture “Penis Nailed to a Board” soon followed and her first solo exhibition at City Racing Gallery brought her recognition in her own right. In 1993, and inspired by Vivian Westwood and Michael McLaren’s 1970s shop Let it Rock, Lucas and fellow YBA Tracy Emin set up a temporary shop (called “The Shop”) at 103 Bethnal Green Road, London. Though their friendship proved to be rather short lived, Lucas and Emin called themselves “The Birds” and promoted their shop by handing out business cards at parties. The pair sold decorated key-rings, wire penises, T-shirts hand-painted with slogans such as “Love Come” and “Fucking Useless” and ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s face pasted to them. Lucas’s first solo commercial exhibition with Sadie Coles, “Bunny Gets Snookered” in 1997, was a great success and paved the way for her works “Sod you Gits” (1991), “Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab” (1992) and “Pauline Bunny” (1997) to be included in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy. Lucas became known for partying hard at places like the Groucho Club, and Colony Rooms in Soho, London, and for her “unabashedly all-balls-out, rock ‘n’ roll” attitude. Lucas herself confessed to being an aggressive drunk: “I had such an axe to grind and I was annoyed. I was furious with all these blokes with their one-line ideas getting successful around me”. However, speaking later of her association with the YBAs, Lucas said, “At the time, you were struggling in such an awful, egocentric way that you couldn’t appreciate how amazing it was. I think most of us, all of us, now think, ‘Fuck, that was incredible'”. By 1998 – by which time her works were selling for six figure sums at auction – Lucas decided to start working one day a week at the Colony Rooms, a famous bar (previously by the likes of Francis Bakon) in London’s Soho. Lucas doesn’t have an assistant, has never had a studio, and prefers to work from home with available materials. Having achieved a level of financial security, her status has allowed her to work intermittently and at her own pace rather than under the pressure of deadlines. In a recent work, Lucas cast her partner Julien Simmons’s penis repeatedly for an artwork called “Penetralia”, describing the process as “playing around” and her “hands doing it [the art] more than [her] head”. In an attempt to avoid the chaos of the metropolitan art scene, Lucas moved to Suffolk and stopped reading art magazines and newspapers. Her “retreat” allowed her to maintain connections with friends, fellow artists and to focus on her work. She currently lives with Simmons (in a converted cottage previously owned by Benjamin Britten), continuing a pattern of dating fellow artists. Her ex-boyfriend, collaborator, and fellow Goldsmiths graduate Angus Fairhurst, tragically committed suicide in 2008 and she has spoken of having to live with the grief of that tragedy and also her own struggles with depression. In an interview with writer Aida Edemariam, she put Fairhurst’s death down to the sudden explosion of the YBA generation and the pressures of fame and fortune that followed: “I do have doubts”, she said, “and when I’m putting a show together, and the day goes badly, I’m thinking this is how he must have felt”.