Lucy Skaer: Exit, Voice and Loyalty

For her most ambitious solo exhibition in the UK since the Turner prize in 2009, Lucy Skaer presents a new body of sculptures in Tramway’s main gallery. Skaer’s new work engages the idea of ‘prehistory’ – the span of time before recorded history and the invention of writing systems. By extension she is interested in the narrative potential of prehistoric objects and the power of material itself to convey meaning in the absence of written language. Interpreting these themes in relation to sculpture, she explores the tension between material and meaning through a series of handmade and mass produced forms.   Skaer uses materials with highly specific histories, ranging from personal space and domestic time, such as the worn stone steps from the house where the artist grew up, to economic value and commercial time: her recent sculptures are carved from ‘sinker’ mahogany - heavy trees felled in 19th-century Belize forests that sunk as they floated down river. These trees were recently discovered and are now dredged and sold for export.
  Pushing the medium of sculpture to its limits, Skaer's Tramway exhibition is based on a single modular form, which acts as a structure, a vessel and a language for ideas of history and the formation of meaning.