Opening view: Saturday 20 January 2007, 2-4pm
20 January to 10 March 2007
"Lady Lucy is an artist like no other. Her chosen medium is drawing and to this end, she is constantly in the process of producing an extraordinary range of drawn art works. Her appetite for the act of drawing is vociferous. Never, it seems, is she without her beloved sketchbook. Compulsively, she draws at every opportunity. In the main, she takes as her subject matter people around her. People she knows, people she meets, people with whom she comes into contact, and people she observes. In the case of the people she observes, these are drawn from the printed page as frequently as from real life... Lady Lucy's work is very much about the human condition, in some of its most weird and wonderful forms. Her drawings are though, much more than the product of an extraordinarily gifted artist. It's almost as if her compulsion to sketch speaks of a very evident cathartic process. As she herself says "I draw because I have to, and because I want to capture life as it happens... Drawings help me work things out. My sketchbooks are like my diaries." Extract from gallery brochure
This is the first major solo exhibition of work by an enigmatic Bristol-based artist, Lucy Woollett aka Lady Lucy. This exhibition brings together several bodies of work produced over the past couple of years. The exhibition also features a selection of the fascinating source material from which the artist draws inspiration for her candid and fascinating drawn studies of human existence. Her chosen method of expression is the drawn image. In this regard, she is an artist like no other, in that she is a prolific artist who, in the course of any given week or month, produces very distinctive and highly original drawings.
This exhibition features Lady Lucy's acclaimed body of work, produced 2005/6, based on an obscure publication that she found in a charity shop. The World Filmography 1968 is a series of imaginative, witty and thoroughly engaging drawings of entries from a book of the same name
The exhibition also features Lady Lucy's investigations of the world of ballroom dancing, based on photographs gleaned from a stumbled - upon batch of old copies of Ballroom Dancing Times. These drawings explore the eccentricity, the sheer oddness, of the spectacle of ballroom dancing, its etiquette, its conventions and the people who immerse themselves in its culture.
A fully illustrated brochure (ISBN: 1899764 76 3) accompanies the exhibition. It features an essay of Lady Lucy's work, written by Eddie Chambers, the exhibition's curator.
Lady Lucy was born in Birmingham 1974.
Lady Lucy will be in conversation with Eddie Chambers:
Thursday 8 February 2007, 7pm at Unit 2 Gallery
