Exploring the Influences on and Themes of Lucienne Rickard’s Work.

Lucienne Rickard is a Tasmanian artist whose work fascinates, intrigues and delights. She is one of Australia’s most compelling and vital artists. Her work sits at the intersection of a number of artistic endeavours – drawing, sculpture, and performance art. It has been extensively described and reviewed in other articles, so, this post tries to encapsulate the essence of a recent conversation Lucienne had with the members of Southern Salon when she talked about the themes that dominate her work, the imperatives that influence her, the techniques, and media she uses and the effect her work has on her.

Because her own words provide the most revelatory way to capture how she works and what drives her, they have been quoted extensively here. Also, words mean a great deal to Lucienne, as evidenced by the thoughtful notes she wrote about drawings in the Extinction Studies series and the influence of literature on her work. So, her words give us an eloquent insight into her art.

Yet simply because her work is made to be viewed, the viewer’s gaze cannot be ignored. Words that recur in descriptions and explanations of Lucienne’s work include “obsessive and hypnotic”, “meticulous”, “realistic, detailed and archival”,  “accurate” and with “elements of the hyper-real, of the photo-real”. Many of her works are monumental and were physically exhausting to execute. The Extinction Studies were each drawn as solo images on 2 x 1.5 m single sheets of paper. For the viewer, they are mesmerising and emotionally charged.

Extinction Studies, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, September 2019 – January 2023, photograph courtesy of the artist.

Her erasure of the painstakingly detailed drawings in the Extinction Studies series at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery [September 2019 to January 2023] provoked anger and protests, with the last, the Xerces Blue Butterfly, being the subject of a concerted campaign to save it. “That was the one that hurt the most,” Lucienne told us, “There was a huge fuss about it.” While it had required a considerable investment of time, in the end, Lucienne said, comparing its erasure to the irretrievable loss of the creatures she had drawn, it was “just a drawing”.  Unlike onlookers, Lucienne found it “really satisfying and gratifying” to rub out the drawings, given her purpose to replicate and publicise the extinction of her subjects and to evoke the time it had taken for them to come into existence, the longevity of that existence, and the rapidity with which they were extinguished. Rubbing them out was “so fast” Lucienne says, “brutally fast”. The first swipe produced sharp intakes of breath from onlookers who then watched in appalled silence as stroke by stroke she obliterated the drawings leaving only haunting traces that were then covered by the subsequent creatures she drew and also wiped away.

Xerxes Blue Butterfly, Extinction Studies, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, September 2019 – January 2023, photograph courtesy of the artist.

I’m really interested in how it’s possible for a moment in time, or an action or something that happens, something that you do, to persist throughout a long period of time and even beyond this realm, beyond life and death. It’s interesting how you can feel presences from people or things that are really removed from when they happened.”

The Extinction Studies drawings are not the first of her works that Lucienne has demolished. However, the first time she did this was for very different reasons and had a very different effect on her. For her PhD at the University of Tasmania (finished in 2005 and awarded in 2006) she made twenty massive sculptures, (60cm x 60cm x 20cm of solid plaster). When she finished her PhD and was going overseas to take up the Rosamond McCulloch Cité des Arts Paris Residency in 2006, she didn’t have anywhere to leave them. So, she destroyed them. They were so solid and strong that she had to use a forklift to pick them up and drop them, smashing them into chunks that would fit into the Art School skip. Only two remain. It really upset her to do this and “put her off sculpture for a while”.

Those sculptures reveal some of the themes and techniques consistently underpinning her work – its physical repetitiveness and how that physical repetitiveness reflects and creates notions or aspects of time, and submersion and suspension in time and space.  In creating the sculptures, Lucienne first made huge blocks of plaster; then she super-glued pads of sandpaper to different parts of coveralls bought from a hardware shop. Wearing the coveralls, she ground grooves into the plaster by, laboriously and for months on end, making repeated movements across the plaster. In her PhD thesis she likened this process to swimming, to different kinds of swimming, and reflected on how swimming comprises moving through space, and “what that repetitive movement and the different kinds of spaces that you might move through, do to your sense of time.”

Here we see foundational links between Lucienne’s process of making and her thinking about time and space.

Her own words give the best explanation:

“I wrote extensively about swimming in my PhD thesis. I grew up on the Gold Coast and we had a pool in the backyard. We were all swimmers as kids. Dad took us to swimming training, every morning, for an hour before school and we would swim. I did that until I was about 18. I wrote about a pontoon off a beach on Lord Howe Island where my grandmother lived. We would go there for school holidays every year as children, through into our late teen years. And there was a pontoon on a calm, safe swimming beach for kids. It was moored offshore, and it was a little way out, so we would swim out to it and hop onto it and sunbake. But my thing with my brother as a kid was to dive under it, underneath it. I found that really terrifying. It’s that funny thing where your mind plays tricks on you – because it was only two meters by two meters, if that, possibly a little bit more. You could hold your breath and do that, do double that, triple that easily but the space itself, the column of water underneath the pontoon was colder, you’d feel it as soon as you went under, and there were things growing underneath the pontoon that would tickle as you swam under. I had a really active imagination so I would imagine something was about to bite me as I was swimming through. So, it would be a really daring thing to do and the sense of time doing that was odd because I’d feel like I was running out of breath and that it was taking too long. It’s a really interesting thing, the swimming thing, and the repetition and being enclosed in that other space, I suppose, away from the normal stream of things. I find it really interesting.”

Lucienne later reflected, “Maybe, I’ve been trying to make art that’s like swimming my whole life.”

The impetus for Lucienne’s PhD work came from paintings she did during her Honours year at Art School. Those paintings were about hair brushing, which invoked connections to her mother and from her mother to her grandmother, and so on. The repetitive strokes of hair brushing, “so common and known to us all”, conjured those connections. Using actual hairbrushes coated in oil paint, Lucienne brushed large canvases with strokes that were as long as her body, constructing areas of oil paint that looked like hair and creating a sense of depth by building up layers of paint. She wished to take this aspect of her work further in her PhD, and make three-dimensional works, imbued with her thinking about movement, space and time. And there was the connection to swimming. She thought, “it’s harder to move through water than just walking on land. There’s more resistance and that slight increase in resistance really changes your sense of time.” So, then she wondered, “what would happen if you really, really increased the resistance, what would happen to your sense of time then?”

With the value of further years’ insight, Lucienne, thinks that a major driver behind her PhD works, and one that still impels her, is a need to explore the possibility of attaining “a sense of suspension”. On reflection, she poses the question that underpins her work this way: “if you could make your movements slow and arduous enough and make a sort of separate space to make them in, and really enclose yourself and perform this process, would it be possible to alter your sense of time to the point where you feel suspended? So that’s what I was interested in. I didn’t like, and still don’t like, the passage of time where there are really beautiful memories, but they have happened, and you can’t get at them anymore. I’m really interested in how it’s possible for a moment in time, or an action or something that happens, something that you do, to persist throughout a long period of time and even beyond this realm, beyond life and death. It’s interesting how you can feel presences from people or things that are really removed from when they happened.”

And for the viewer, this is what she does with what she draws. Her subjects are suspended in a void, visually and in time, like a memory. In the Extinction Studies, although she rubbed the drawings out, they are still there, layered on top of each other.

Extinction Studies, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, September 2019 – January 2023, photograph courtesy of the artist.

With other works, particularly her drawings of animals captured in fleeting moments of action or longer moments of quiet, she creates a different sense of timelessness. These animals are locked in the amber of her detailed depiction. The meticulousness of their detail recalls the repetitiveness in her process. Lucienne explained that that repetition is the way she removes herself from “the normal flow” and that that is seductive to her. It enables her to get into a meditative state, which she really craves. Their timelessness also emerges in another way: they bring to mind cave drawings. Beyond some background smudges, there’s no context, they sit beyond time, as something important, possibly magical, to the artists, and frozen in time forever.

Lucienne remarked, “I never do backgrounds, do I?” No, but she does do light. Remarkably for works in pencil on paper, she infuses them with light. Lucienne claims that this is achieved in part at least by some of the media she has used – graphite 9B pencil or charcoal on opaque drafting film that reflects surrounding colours and enables layering. Because 9B pencils are no longer available in the brand she likes, Lucienne is experimenting with other pencils including 13B, which she describes as extravagant. She is also using charcoal. Clearly it is not just the materials she uses that produce the light in her work. It is her technique, skill, and finely grained work. She has developed a technique of altering the direction and angle of her pencil marks to make them reflect light in different ways, and remarkably she is able to generate a range of tones with just a single type of pencil. So, Lucienne thinks carefully about how to utilise light in her works to achieve whatever effect she is seeking. Her control of the light and the tones in her work, together with their single colour, mould her images in such a way that they resemble sculptures.

So where to for Lucienne after the Extinction Studies? She has had to pull back from the more laborious and obsessive elements of her technique because of the physical toll they have taken on her. She has been experimenting recently with saturating T-shirts in charcoal and then pressing them onto wet paper to leave behind the impression of the fabric. She achieves a remarkable amount of detail in this way – the seams, threads, and grain of the fabric. Because she presses the fabric onto the paper with her hands, she doesn’t know what impression has been made on the paper until she lifts the fabric off. She finds this much more interesting than just drawing the T-shirts.

She has also used this method with bed linen. The bed linen works were displayed at the exhibition, In Bed in December 2022, at the Old Mercury Building Gallery in Hobart. The black, white and grey images comprise crumpled, dark, shadowy, brooding and mysterious shapes, smudged at their boundaries. At the exhibition, they appeared otherworldly in the soft glow of the spotlighting and hovered as amorphous beings that could not be ignored. The folds, gatherings, and draped fabric were suspended like the openings to unknown, cloudy netherworlds.  They were not welcoming.  Certainly not as beds.  But they were curiously compelling and also disconcerting.

They are large works, about the size of a queen-size bed. Three are polyptych (four panels as one image), and one is a diptych.

In making these works, Lucienne laid out a queen-size fitted sheet and spent more than four hours rubbing charcoal into the fabric.  Then, on the floor, she laid out four taped paper panels, which she dampened to allow the charcoal to adhere and penetrate and laid the sheet out on the paper.  She spent hours rubbing and stamping the sheeting into the paper.  For each iteration she had to reapply more charcoal.

When you listen to her explain the process, the images become infinitely more curious and appear to have created their own three-dimensional etch marks.  Gathered elastic can be made out in some corners, with the ruching creating its own foreground and background.

In Bed, Old mercury Building Gallery, December 2022, photograph courtesy of the artist.

Lucienne is also experimenting with folded graphite works and said that she may return to working with plaster but this time also using felt.

Whatever turn her work takes, it is bound to intrigue, fascinate, and beguile.

Speaking with Lucienne Rickard was a joy, and Southern Salon thanks her for sharing her time and insights with us.