Artist Lucy Irvine’s signature artwork at 2022 Design Canberra Festival stimulates conversation about transformation

Pic: Irene Lemon

Pic: Irene Lemon

Canberra-based artist Lucy Irvine’s site specific signature artwork Given Conditions at Civic Square, as part of the 2022 Design Canberra Festival, is thought-provoking and sparks conversations about reimagining the places in which we live.

The annual Design Canberra Festival, which celebrates Canberra as a global city of design and was held from November 2-20, explored the theme of Transformation this year.

Lucy, the designer-in-residence for the 2021-22 Design Canberra Festival, is an artist and a lecturer in Textiles at The Australian National University (ANU) School of Art and Design.

The theme of the festival is reflected in Lucy’s artwork as she usually uses materials that are a part of the urban environment. “While making a woven sculpture, the materials that I use are not hidden but go through the process of transformation, in which they become more than themselves in many ways,” she said.

Her artwork Given Conditions in Civic Square, displayed during the duration of the festival, is about “reimagining how we might design the places in which we live.”

Through Second Space Civic Square pilot program, held in collaboration with The City Renewal Authority, ANU School of Art and Design creative practice researchers are experimenting with ways to bring their making and research practice into our Canberra city spaces. Lucy is the ANU project lead for the program.

“Making this artwork in the city and imagining what might be possible in the future has been an amazing experience,” she said.

Lucy’s artist statement reads, “Made from expansion joint foam and woven by hand, the sculptural form emerges stitch by stitch, loop by loop and thought by thought. In using an industrial material that is usually part of our unseen urban fabric, informed by the site of its making and scaling three levels of its host architecture; the work responds to its own given conditions.”

Her signature work The Stills, commissioned for the Design Canberra Festival, is being exhibited at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. It highlights the transforming process by working on a series of bronze casts.

“It does take you one step away from the original materials. Recently, I made a large multi-paneled artwork using silicone moulds from the casts of the panels. Later, I decided to revisit the moment of transformation by pouring wax back into those moulds over and over again,” she said.

“Every time, they were different. It makes you realise that even revisiting the process has the potential for transformation.”