LES NUAGES DANS LE CIEL : January 2014

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas (b. 1962) emerged in the 1990s as one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her works are characterised by confrontational humour, sexual puns and an ironic exploration of Englishness. She found objects like fruit, furniture, clothing transformed into analogues for the sexualized bodies.

Sarah Lucas’s series of sculptures, NUDS (2009-10) consists of nylon tights stuffed with fluff and fashioned into ambiguous biomorphic forms. The works lean towards primitivism and abstraction, and their sexual element links them with the gender-orientated works that defined Lucas’s practice in the early 1990s and after, in which assemblages of found objects became stand-ins for the female body (for example, Bitch, 1995, consists of two melons slung inside a T-shirt stretched around a table).

Lucas has said that NUDS comes from the slag word for naked, which I can personally see why. The sculptures demonstrate likeness to the flesh, in its colour, texture and malleable form. Hence its appropriateness with my study of the human form, as each NUD sculpture looks like a fragment of the body, either an intestine or possible a limb entangled.

In particular, they recall early works, such as the Bunny series of 1997 which approximated sexual female forms – fragile, available, literal – through disembodied and gesturing limbs. The coinage NUDS itself implies knots, nodes, or nudes and is evidence of Lucas’s use of puns, slang and language as an element of her sculpture, and the works brim with other allusions, inviting different interpretations from the tender to the auto-erotic.The Bunnys are inspired by the Playboy bunny empire by Hugh Hefner and his soft porn magazines. Her bunnies are lacking heads made out of stuffed tights, their bunny ears have flopped and collapsed.

The bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body lie at the heart of Sarah Lucas’s work. Lucas’s materials - furniture, clothing, food – are sculptural and associative. Nylon tights provide a useful casing: stuffed with wadding they become splayed limbs of female bodies. Tights are also intimate, erotic, yet cheap and disposable, both glamorous and abject.

Stained mattresses, sofas and chairs act as plinths for ‘bodies’ sometimes situated against the surreal domesticity of Lucas’s wallpapers. Her figures are all headless.

For MUMMUM, Lucas has covered a hanging chair in breasts. Stockings formed and stuffed to appear like boobs, all clustering together in a huddle Nylon tights apply shorthand for grooming and the construction of femininity. As a material, this may seem at odds with the images usually evoked by Lucas, which primarily focus on the sexuality of women, but often stripped of the usual trappings of femininity. Perhaps I find this artwork captivating for reasons as an instrument of motherhood (infantile fixation), or their erotic significance. Incorporating a nest of all possible colour tights, here every breast seems represented. All shapes, all sizes, all colours.