Victoria Lucas Archive Books, 2006 - 2009

Selected by Rachel Lois Clapham

Victoria Lucas makes books, video installations and photography - a lot of object-making for someone with an essentially ephemeral practice, although Victoria is equally as invested in the physicality and craft of her objects as she is in choreographing ideas, or more specifically the ‘absence’ the objects represent.

For Archive Books, Victoria collects, scans, then binds fragments into books that are housed in special collections and sold at fairs. The publications ‘Trace’ (2008) (documenting a set of second hand spectacles) and ‘Eraser’ (2007) (containing scans of childhood rubbers) testify to the prior secret life of these objects. The books themselves act as portable solo exhibitions and contemporary Sammelbände, where meaning is literally stitched together in the act of binding.

Victoria’s work-in-progress currently showing at Lumen, is explicitly embroiled in the dialectics of presence. In ‘Absent Presence’ (2009) a site specific projection that screens the space of Lumen’s lab back onto itself. The difference between the real and filmic is indicated by a small electric heater and folded chair, both depicted in the projection but physically absent from the actual space. The layering of physical and projected details, combined with the occasional flicker of the film, highlights the materiality of the projection. Through this proximity of the projection we experience the absent and inanimate objects as present, active, or durational.

Also at Lumen are two video works that similarly sculpt absence/presence through a playful inattention or looking away from their object of study. ‘My Body Became Time’ (2009) shows shaky footage of the inside of the lab - the results of a dancer interpreting the space via a digital camera strapped to her body. The work troubles the physicality or presence of the lab space (both real and on screen) in relation to the absent body of the dancer. ‘Ballet Pumps’ (2009) is a video recording of a live ballet rehearsal in which the camera is pointed on a carpeted floor. The sounds of ballet pumps shuffling on lino, piano playing and shouted instructions from dance tutors are the only discernable traces of the off screen performance.

Whatever the medium, Victoria’s work continually defers meaning away from its surface; the objects she creates are matters of distraction and the latency of the work suggests an intriguing form of archival return in which performance (absence) becomes object (presence), and might become performance again. 

Victoria Lucas Work In Progress @ Lumen, 2009

Victoria Lucas Untitled (Physics Storeroom), 2007

Rachel Lois Clapham is a curator and writer and Co-Director of Open Dialogues, she recently moved from London to Bradford with Critical Communities

Victoria Lucas on Axis
Rachel Lois Clapham

July 2009