Lucy Skaer with Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer and Hanneline Visnes
The Green Man
Talbot Rice Gallery
The University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge,
Edinburgh, EH8 9YL
27 July - 6 October, 2018
Lucy Skaer’s exhibition The Green Man is an exploration and reanimation of the desire to collect. Throughout her practice, Skaer mines and manipulates pre-existing imagery—from art, history, and from her own oeuvre and personal history—transforming and destabilizing relationships between materials and meanings. For this exhibition, Skaer has selected items from the collections of the University of Edinburgh and invited fellow artists to inhabit the galleries of Talbot Rice alongside her—Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer and Hanneline Visnes.
By calling the exhibition The Green Man, Lucy Skaer is likening the animation of collections, and the spontaneous generation of form in her artwork Sticks and Stones, to the symbol of renewal to be found in figures made of leaves and vines. Present in both pagan and Church imagery, the Green Man made a resurgence after the plague, when wilderness and weeds took over the arable land. From the anthropomorphic sculptures in her recent work La Chasse, to the evolution of materials and forms we find in Sticks and Stones, Lucy Skaer will be weaving the authority of natural materials and forms throughout the exhibition.
The Green Man will include new works commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery for the exhibition, providing playful new ways for the collections of the University to speak to visitors.