Trocadero Online Series #1 Lucy Kingsley

In the inaugural 'Online Talk Series', Committee Member Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son speaks with artist Lucy Kingsley about her upcoming show 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your severed hair.' Curious about structures of storytelling, Lucy's work explores how visual and textual information is ripped from context and how these parts stand dismembered from their sources.

Lucy Kingsley is an emerging Narrm/Melbourne-based visual artist and physical theatre performer. Her practice explores collage, painting, drawing, costuming, sculpture and creative writing. Lucy holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (2017) from Monash University and was the recipient of the World Food Books Prize for her work as part of the MADANow Graduate Exhibition, 2017.

View this recorded talk on our YouTube Channel here:

Lucy Kingsley: @ssalty_ssunflower

Interviewer - Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son

Transcript: Eleanor Beardsell

Image: Lucy Kingsley

Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son: Welcome everyone, my name is Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son, and you are currently watching a recorded Zoom artist interview with Trocadero Art Space. Wherever you are, thank you for joining us. I would like to begin today by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we are currently located. Trocadero Art Space acknowledges that we are on the traditional lands of Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples. And we pay our respects to the Elders past, present, and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

Today, Lucy Kingsley has generously joined us for her artist interview with Trocadero Art Space. She is an emerging Narrm/Melbourne-based visual artist and physical theatre performer. Her work is curious towards corporeality, which does not have a body. She will be having her upcoming exhibition, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your severed hair’, at Trocadero Art Space later this year. Wherever you are, please welcome Lucy Kingsley. Hi Lucy, how are you today?

Lucy Kingsley: I’m good thanks Ellen, how are you?

Ellen: Good, good. For those who are not familiar with you, could you please kindly introduce yourself?

Lucy: Yeah sure. As you said, I’m an emerging Narrm/Melbourne-based visual artist. My practice is supported by an exploration into mostly collage. Also delving into painting, drawing, video, sculpture and creative writing. I use the word collage to describe my work in the sense of looking at – like I often work to bring a lot of different source materials together, a lot of different visual data and then layer them over video and also in paper form. So it’s kind of essential in the methodology of my working and also results in a collage looking form. My work is usually looking at the experience of the body and a lot of subjective experiences of the world. My most recent exhibition, which was my first solo exhibition, was at Rubicon Artspace in North Melbourne. That was a great experience as my first solo exhibition, and it was kind of re-exhibiting some honours work from a few years ago that was looking at the idea of the physical wound as a physical site but also a more philosophical site looking at the idea of trauma. And that work kind of inquired into a different set of narratives around contact and boundaries, ideas of horror and violence, the ritualistic and ceremonial, and the ideas of health and unhealth. That exhibition was called ‘A New Space Made Possible By Loss’. I’m kind of just beginning to become more public as an artist which is why I use the term ‘emerging artist’ – I’m still kind of getting a sense of what my work probes at and what the subject of it is. I’m really looking forward to when the exhibition at Trocadero can come about as a physical sense. It’s really great to have this virtual exploration of the exhibition that is still going to happen.

I undertook an interesting residency program – it was a 2-month program – between July and September last year in a tiny village in Italy. It was in Southern Italy so not the side of Naples but the other side – you could actually see the Greek islands from the Coastal town I was at. It was a small town called Gagliano del Capo, and it only has about 4000 people who live there residentially. I applied to do some work at a small contemporary art organisation down there. I was the only artist in residence and there were a couple of other volunteers and other staff members and working on projects and building exhibitions and a lot of projects they were doing was looking at the idea of extreme land and remote land because the cite of the village is such an extreme location. The village only really hosts a small portion of tourism running through there and they are mostly European tourists. It was very strange for me to be a lone, female artist from Australia there and I don’t speak Italian and could only really converse with 4-5 other people for that whole two-month period.

It was really interesting and it was personally and professionally a really transformative time for me and I undertook it as an experiment in deciding whether I wanted to continue an art practice and putting myself in an extreme scenario that in a lot of ways I’m revisiting right now. I guess a lot of us are managing these ideas of limitation in movement and restriction of our lifestyle and that was very much what I was going through there – you know socially I couldn’t really converse that often. It’s interesting comparing the isolation of being in Italy and investigating my art practice with the current situation globally that we are all facing now of these very unusual circumstances that limit what we would usually be doing. That was a great thing to go through last year.

Ellen: In your art practice, you said you are interested in themes that are common in fairy-tales and folktales. How did you come to explore these themes, and could you please explain some of your favourite themes that you have explored the most?

Lucy: Yeah. It’s interesting to think about European, kind of Grim brothers, kind of staple fairy-tale and folktales. Cinderella and Rapunzel and all these things that kind of maybe at the time of popularisation aimed to be a moral code for societies in Europe. And I think they continued to hold a really powerful space in the cultural imagination of Western ideas of how we are all meant to live our lives. They always seem to hold – I’m kind of drawn to them because they have these really graphic connotations to them. Like the way they look at metamorphosis, flesh, violence, health and animals and fur and sacrifice. Ideas have transitioned from times of day – there are these really strong motifs that repeat. I think when I was doing that residency last year in Italy it was such a fantastical, dream-like experience and I was writing a lot about my experiences in a poetry prose form. I noticed I was referencing motifs from these stories or using structures that they would use. I might read a little bit of a piece that I wrote called ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your severed hair’ which is the title of the Trocadero exhibition that I will be exhibiting. This piece looks at elements of what I was experiencing over there. I’ll read it and come back to the idea of fairy-tales and folktales. This is an excerpt from it:

A few days ago I sizzled my fringe on a stovetop I was invited to smoke from. With a corona in hand ,left alone whilst the stranger finished an errand. I noticed his bed sheets were on the couch instead of the bed and we laughed about the library I was trying to find that was not open because it did not exist. He swiped away the dead strings from my forehead. They began to fly with the wind and I thought it was tobacco. ‘You are not naturally golden?’ he asked as I tip upside down and comb from my roots. I fan spaghetti into salted water so the straws mute the heat and sink evenly into the boil. Then extract a blonde thread and throw it against the wall. It sticks. It’s ready.

I guess that’s kind of like a form of storytelling and looking at ideas of the way material undergoes a transformation. There is a lot of repetition of the mode of hair and the way that’s referred to as spaghetti. There is kind of a mixing of something quite violent happening that to me has a lot of associations with European mythology. Someone I’m quite influenced by is an American, female poet writer. He was mostly prominent in the ‘70s, writing these brilliant short stories looking at traditional European folktales like Snow White and Red Riding Hood – her name is Angela Carter. She was inspired by 19th century symbolist poets and also 20th century French surrealist writers. Her stories always have a feminist perspective and really subvert the problematic aspects of those folktales in a really interesting way. I read a lot of her stuff and draw from the visuals that she references.

Ellen: Going back to your experience at the residency program in Italy you said there weren’t many people around. Has that isolating experience influenced you in some way working with mythology and motifs around fairy-tales?

Lucy: Because the time I spent there was, as you say so isolating, everything did kind of start to become a bit otherworldly and feeling like I was existing in a bit of a fictional space. I think it was consequentially got me naturally thinking about folktales and narratives that are similarly engaged with ideas of isolation. This idea of Rapunzel is a lone figure in a tower waiting for things to happen. In my experience there - it’s not like I was trying to conflate our two identities or anything but there were qualities of my experience there that made sense for me to record and think about as a mythological happening.

For example just thinking visually and spatially I worked and also lived in the one space where the contemporary art organisation was running from which ran on top of a train station. I kept thinking about this idea of height because we lived on the second floor of this station that I would go up to the rooftop every so often and have a really good view of the flat landscape around me and everything was so sparse that it was interesting for me to think about how my days were also quite sparse and not a lot was happening and the time and pace of things was so slow it kind of felt like everything moved in slow motion. It was a place that was socially and politically quite isolated from the rest of the world because the only outsiders that would come… it was very divorced from the happenings there and a strange coming in – a foreigner coming in – the only people who would be doing that would be kind of wealthy European tourists who would stay at this really mythological looking Palazzo, like a palace, in the middle of the town centre on the Piazza. Then there was basically me, this very out of place Australian, young, lone woman being an artist there and then the occasional tourist passing through. It was a kind of transitory space in that way. A lot of what was happening, from my perception as an outsider there, made a lot of sense with thinking about European mythology and fairy-tales and things.

To close off that idea of height – not only was I always positioned and looking at things from that high stand point, the village itself existed on a cliff face and so a lot of the reasons people go there, and also why there was a contemporary arts organisation running out of there was because it is such an extreme land and an extreme territory. So these grottos and these cliff faces demarcate the end of Europe and the beginnings of the seas and waters that would lead to the Greek islands and the North of Africa. Geographically it was an isolated place and I used to ride this bike around on the roads there and the road would run on the periphery of the coast and every time you wanted to go down to the beaches that would be dotted along the coast, in-between villages, you’d have to do a massive drop and dive down quite dramatically on a steep hill to get to the beaches. Which I guess is often the way land and water meet each other. But it was such a significant drop that I couldn’t really escape the idea of descending and ascending and coming back up and down. I think that’s also part of the reason I was thinking about ideas of towers and Rapunzel.

Ellen: In your practice, you often involve images in mosaic and storyboard formats. How do you choose which images to include in these formats, and why do you use these formats to explore the themes that you just talked about?

Lucy: The way I often work is by revisiting this library of images that I’ve been collecting over time so I often will develop that portfolio of visuals by working on my laptop screenshotting images or stills from films and then uploading photographs I take on my camera and phone onto the computer to be added to the archive. I guess what I often try to do is map or diagram the visual repetitions and all those visuals. I often line them up, one next to each other, or I start by bringing together two images side by side and looking at the way that the now unified image can be viewed from left to right. Because my work is often operating in a way that it brings visuals together to tell a collective narrative – narrative not in the sense of a linear, progression narrative but just a maybe even a fragmented or fractured narrative – I’m often playing with those tropes of the Western way you read a text or a sentence - for example by reading left to right.

I guess when I’m working with mosaic, bringing together of imagery, where it may appear more as a grid than a succession of lined images, more like a photo collage strip, the mosaic experiments with what does it mean for multiple images to occupy the same real estate in the one view. With video, in terms of working with video and this idea of formatting, I find it interesting how images can layer on top of one another and what does it mean for one image to appear one after the other and accumulate into an eventual story where you are really only viewing one image at a time but all of these things are gaining momentum to tell something overall. I like to think about those collage strips in terms of being film storyboards or old 35mm film strips. I guess all of that work is really probing at the idea of how the presentation of images leads the viewer to encounter them in a deliberate way where things are progressing to tell something in the end.

Recently I think all of this is linked into the idea of time and I really want to abolish all understanding of how I think and perceive time at the moment being a linear progression of the past being behind you and the future is in front of you and everything is flowing on. I think that the way we are conditioned, in this capitalist way of thinking, to perceive time is really narrow and limiting and doesn’t serve me personally or artistically. I think my work is looking at time as well and how that is spatialised and visualised.

When I do a lot of creative writing that kind of goes hand in hand with this image building and image collecting and in the slideshow (Image: poem accompanied by photograph of Lucy on a bike) I’ve put up a text – kind of like a visual poem named ‘up down up down’. This poem was written on a day when I was at the residency in Italy when I rode my bike along those cliff faces and the landscape was so hilly and I would kind of have to go up and down on the bike and I eventually arrived at another town where there was a church and in the poem it often references these two different time spaces of experiencing that bike journey as of something that happened in the past while explaining it in the present.

I did a vertical strip of one sentence and then put some text that references the past on the left hand side, and the present on the right hand side which references the way that the church I ended up in and is set up in the interior: having the central nave, two sets of pews, symmetrically balanced either side of it. On the right-hand side of this slideshow there is just a still of a video experiment I did recently of maybe being a visual that could be included in the eventual work of ‘up down up down’ poetry. I was thinking I could record me presenting or delivering that text over the top of this single frame video of me riding the bike. The way I set up that frame was very much in direct relation to how I wrote the text, of having central vertical spine going up the middle. My body is positioned in the middle of that frame, as is the bike, and it in a way illustrates some of the visual components of the text on the left-hand side. I guess overall my work comes about in this thinking space between text and visual and the way I experiment with mosaic and storyboard formats is an extension of that realm of thinking where an episode or a narrative happening across time is being delivered and spatialised in different ways.

Ellen: It’s interesting looking at the text. There is an order of past and present. How I register it first is - instead of as a text - I register it as an image. A very symmetrical, ordered image and it took me a bit of time to get into reading individual words. Is there some reason why, aside from following that structure of having the spine and referring to the image on the right, is there a reason why you were drawn into putting the order of words of words and paragraphs and sentences in more of a symmetrical form?

Lucy: I’m not sure why I did that beyond what I already mentioned about the poem being about eventually arriving at that church space and the interior architecture of churches being very beautiful spaces that are always aesthetically have that balance and that symmetry. It’s something I can’t seem to really escape with my work of coming back to long, rectangular, vertical or horizontal forms which you might be able to get a sense of in some of the images and the slideshows. I often think about how the body shifts often between these two positions of being an upright, standing, vertical figure that is quite active and mobile. Then when we sleep or when we die, and we become a corpse, we become a horizontal, long form that is in a way a very vulnerable position. Because you are not that upright figure anymore and able to kind of manage a threat or anything so the idea of vertical and horizontal seems to be a recurrent visual in my work.

Ellen: Talking about your upcoming exhibition with these themes – what are the things you will explore in your upcoming exhibition ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your severed hair’ at Trocadero Artspace? Have there been any texts that inspired you to explore these things?

Lucy: The exhibition at Trocadero will mostly feature a video collage which is most likely to be presented in a projection on the wall in Gallery 2. The work slices two worlds of visuals. The first world is footage of young adolescent boys jumping from the cliff faces into the water at the village residency I was at in Italy last year. It has that visual going that is a common thing that people do in Italy as residents or holiday-ers as a fun thing to jump off the cliff, so I recorded a lot of that.

The second world that the visuals draw from is direct extracts form this film from 1976 which is actually a pornographic film named ‘Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy’. The work is quite bizarre and absurd in the way that it splices these two happenings together. The Alice in Wonderland film itself, as you may be able to tell, is looking at the Lewis Carrol novels of Alice in Wonderland and using that narrative to become a pornographic film that is based on around how Alice as a young woman comes into her sexuality. The way that my video works, I suppose, is it tries to probe at the idea of the sublime and that being an experience where it is an extreme state, and things become incomprehensible and the sublime is often thought about as a divine experience.

I’m reading this text at the moment by the French intellectual, mostly writing in the ‘40s, his name is George Bataille, and the text is called ‘Eroticism, death and sensuality’. It’s a really dense, philosophical text that looks at the similarities between sex and death which is a very historically established, psychoanalytical idea – we all know that phrase of an orgasm being a ‘little death’. In this text Bataille looks at all kinds of things like erotic experience, sacrifice, transgression and taboo and there is this returned idea that he comes back to, and he introduces at the beginning of the book, that we as beings we are kind of in this crises of being separate and attached to everything around us. He talks about life as a constant mourning of our creation. He interrogates this idea of continuity and discontinuity and just to – I know it’s a bit dense and deep – but just to explain briefly like if you think about our entrance into the world being a foetus growing in the body of another, in the mother’s body, and going through this very violent and traumatic entrance into the world of separating from that body and becoming a form of our own. That is the origin of our being, which is the transition between being continuously attached to another physically and then becoming a separate, discontinuous being in our own right. Throughout the book Bataille looks at the way erotic experience - mostly in the realm of sex but I think eroticism can be more broadly thought of - as a return to a vitality of living. He talks about what it means to have an erotic experience and how that has a relationship to death. This idea of continuity and discontinuity and he talks about violence as this force or episode, or physical thing that is capable of bringing about that transition between continuity and discontinuity. Violence implies the idea of threat which may eventuate in death, and in death we, similar to when we were born, no longer are discontinues we are continuous, and we return to whatever is after which is no longer living.

I’m not sure if that makes sense but I think that I’ve been reading this as I’ve been making this video collage and the collage comes together at this moment when one of the boys is jumping into the water and crashes through the surface, almost smacks into the water’s surface into a new world of being below water. That very loud, very quick instant is repeated, alongside another visual of the pornographic film when Alice flips her hair down and begins this idea of beginning her journey into Wonderland which is a sexually adventurous realm for her – or that’s the way it’s framed in the film. So the video collage for a long time percussively revisits this moment of this boy smacking into the water and Alice flipping her hair down and releasing her hair from her ponytail. It frames these two very physical moments and that’s when the collage really begins to address this idea of violence and the sublime.

Ellen: I can see that you continuously work with the violence element. Whether it’s in the text itself, the image, in the essays or writings you are reading from or just general violence that underlies the motifs of fairy-tales and European mythology. Is there a reason why you were drawn to that or were you not aware that violence is present in your work?

Lucy: I think the work that I presented at Rubicon Artspace in January this year was a really formative, the body of work presented was a really formative collection of works that revealed to me what the subject of my work might be and the way I framed the theoretical investigation of that work was looking at the idea of a physical flesh wound and the theoretical idea of trauma. Because my work was very much pivoting around this idea of what it means to be a body, and what corporality reveals to us about what it means to be living beings. I think that violence has always been a common thread from that point, from that body of work, and I think that it continues to come up with this idea of skin being a physical surface that produces the dichotomy between what is self and what is other. It is a clear barrier that demarcates the beginning of the self and the end of the self, and the beginning of the other. It’s a surface that is philosophically a really rich thing to think about and to ponder on. But it’s also something that’s able to be non-cognitively understood as something that can be put under threat. The way that work was looking at the idea of the wound being a hole in the skin almost… it gets back to this idea of what I’m looking at in this current video work of what it means to disrupt this kind of continuous experience or a continuous surface. Violence is interesting to me in the idea of boundary crossing – I think that’s the best way to describe it. All those Grim Brothers, European mythological tales are extremely problematic in the way that violence against women is just naively talked about and not even interrogated in any way. My work revisits those tales, not in the interest of highlighting the horror of those things, but I think there is something to be said about people’s interest in what violence is, what horror is, and what space that occupies in people’s psychology and cultural imagination.

Ellen: You also said you’re interested in working with painting and drawing, along with the video and images, in the exhibition. How are they different or similar to the way you work with the digital images and video works?

Lucy: I feel like drawing is a staple of making for a lot of artist and I know that for me... I’ve always thought of drawing as a great example or a really interesting metaphor for what artmaking is in general. If you think of representational drawing as a recording of one’s perspective so when you go to draw something you are suspending all assumptions about what is in front of you to objectively note down and draw what that is which is a collection of lines and shapes. I think that drawing occupies an interesting space in my studio work. The way it often comes about is when I look at all the photographs that I collect in my archive, I’ll put them side by side and do a drawn diagram of what the visual relationships are between those two images as a way of interrogating the points of relationship between those two images that might just be visual similarities but it might also reveal something more conceptual that the bringing together of these images is looking at. That’s the way drawing appears in my work most often. The other thing is that, when I do make written pieces in my creative writing – I wouldn’t say I’m a poet and I write a text that is in the form that uses the conventions of poetry to be a text in and of itself – it’s more of a research method I do and something I use to eventually arrive at a visual. So when I do a poem I’ll firstly look at the graphic or the visual imagery that runs in the content of the poem, but what I’ll do is diagrams on the side and annotate the writing with drawings and then the diagrams will often almost become scores or launchpads to taking action to do something else like make a sculpture. That’s the way the work came about, which is in that slideshow there (Image: ‘What was born is pregnant and rotting inside me, 2017’ HD audio visual projection still accompanied by developmental sketches of sculpture) and you can see on the right hand side some sketches I did before making that work of the idea of two heavy materials being stacked on top of one another and then laid out again. That action that the drawing implied was a jumping off point to make a sculpture which eventually became the video work. I think that drawing and creative writing often the point of departure for other modes of making that eventually lead to video and digital works.

Ellen: Since you’ve been collaging different images, writing text and putting that into different forms - whether it’s symmetrical, or in different formats, do you see yourself as a creative writer in a sense of someone who writes their own type of mythology?

Lucy: That’s such a good question. I think that’s right – I think making any kind of creation is a form of world making. I’d like to think that my work is slowly, slowly revealing some kind of overall narrative or subject of work that I’m not quite sure what that is yet. There is a mystery about why we make, and I like to think about artmaking as an act of faith. You’re never really certain if what you’re going to do is going to be worthy. You have an idea and put aside your ego to pursue an idea that you believe will reveal something back to you. I like to think of artmaking not as like a creation of something, but more a purging of all of this visual material that needs to leave my system so that it can just exist, and I can move on. I think there is something about where art comes from, that it doesn’t really know its source, and it’s mythological in that way and what that source is – it is sacred and it can’t be revealed or made visible but we can make visual artworks that provide insight about what that source is.

Ellen: How has your art practice evolved during the COVID-19 situation? Will this time in isolation spark new threads to explore within your own art practice?

Lucy: I think that this is a really strange time and it is so unusual and even after all these months it’s still kind of incomprehensible in a way. It’s hard isn’t it? Because so many things have been made still, but a lot of other things… you can’t ignore what was happening beforehand. Some people’s art practice will continue to be explored and they will work throughout this period despite the conditions and the COVID-19 situation. I think I would be one of those people who isn’t really conceptually going to engage with the situation, but I think that the conditions of what we are facing may kind of influence the work or the way I practice. I think that’s what may happen. It is such a strange thing that is – I don’t really like this term of when will things go back to normal or return to normal because things have changed and there are a lot of positive things that have been revealed about this situation. About how we live that is actually not that healthy, about privilege and people being above others. I think there is a lot of reasons artistically for being present with whatever this situation does to the self and to pay a lot of attention to what you’re going through as an individual, and what that means, but also what society is going through and the way others are coming to realisations about the way they live.

Ellen: I think that it is a really tough time of the year and we don’t know if this will be a temporary or will be with us for a longer period of time. I hope that there will be a positive impact later on when we do come back from isolation, even if social distancing is still in place. Thank you, Lucy. It has been lovely to speak with you about your practice and your coming exhibition at Trocadero Artspace and thank you to all of you watching this recorded Zoom artist interview with Lucy Kingsley.

Lucy: Thanks Ellen, it’s been really cool to chat and I really appreciate your interest in my work. It’s really nice to have this opportunity to reflect on my practice during this time. I really appreciate your time.

We acknowledge that we are on the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We offer our respect to the Elders of these traditional lands and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

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