Lucy Gill

Mastication, 2023

Lucy Gill is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and painting, with interest in print media and textile work. Their work addresses themes of memory and the body, through the use of references related to home, food, and animals. Much of their work involves reimagining their memories through poems or short stories and using this writing process as a tool to situate their memories within tactile objects or paintings. Their sculptural work often uses cast objects and bioplastics made of animal byproducts and food waste.

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In Mastication, Gill slowly preserves and dehydrates apples to create a new skin out of fruit pulp. Through the repetitive labour of producing fruit leather, they have fabricated a draping form that hangs upon a steel frame the size of their body. By anthropomorphizing a natural and accessible food product, Gill questions the matter that a body has the potential to be composed of, and the potential for a different kind of humanness to claim space. Simultaneously, the ambiguity of this porous skin departs from a purely human experience by involving the experiences of an apple, a table, a sunbather, a drying rack, the scent of cinnamon in the air.

The main body of the work is accompanied by a smaller sculpture, offering edible tokens of fruit leather to viewers. Gill invites them to open their mouths, ingest this piece of material, and contemplate how it feels to put a part of the work into their own body. What does it mean for them to see an anthropomorphic form and to cannibalize it?

In Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others she articulates how bodies orient in space: “phenomenology reminds us that spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second-skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.”[1] The phenomenological experience of Mastication, through its taste, smell, and texture places the viewer inside the work while the work is inside the viewer; the work “unfolds in the folds” of the viewer’s body. 

Gill is currently completing a BFA in Sculpture from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and holds a Diploma of Fine Arts from Langara College in Vancouver. Their work has been in numerous group exhibitions in both Montréal and Vancouver, including Rem-i-nis-cence, Art Matters Festival, Montreal (2023), What Is Not But Could Be If, Soft Square Gallery, Montreal (2022), Sustained Attention, ART3 Gallery, Montreal (2022), amongst others.

[1] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1-24, 9.