Romancing The Ruin: Lucia Farrow

Romancing the Ruin is an impressive endeavour of firsts; building upon notions of girlhood,

innocence, and disgust, established in Farrow’s wider body of work, this exhibition constitutes both a solo London debut, and the largest-scale ceramic pieces the artist has ever created, collaborating with an external manufacturer in Stoke-on-Trent after receiving the DYCP Grant with Arts Council England.

On jet-cut tiles with image decals, surprisingly slick surface texture holds fleshy memory of

skin’s imprints, supple raw flesh inextricably melded to solid, vitrified stone, image separable

from mud only through violent destruction of the completed artefact as a whole. While prior

works have indirectly signalled objectification in a partially-concealed, visually absent

manner, here sexualised imagery becomes increasingly direct, no longer hinting but directly communicating- a pair of reddened, plump lips span across the visual expanse of

tile, semi-undressed mirror selfies speak to an intimacy unintended for public view in their

initial capturing. Through paradoxical, outward immortalisation of the ever-changing female

body, transcending millennia, the artist is able to exert greater control over her own

objectified image, away from the unintended reclamation and replication afforded to others

through the endless cycle of digital appropriation.

As with her flat tablets, Farrow’s box-like ceramic sculptures, too, bring longevity to the

temporary and the incidental. Clay requires careful pre-planning for forming, drying, and

firing; a delicate process, and yet these sculptures themselves are casts of ordinary

cardboard boxes, readily discarded in their original forms. They act as vessels for the

containment, and subsequent elevation of found objects from her room and life; fake pearls,

stones, cigarette cartons, notes- granting carefully curated, intimate insight into a squalid

girlishness. Otherwise-ephemeral boxes are fossilised, while the tiles are created by the

manufacturer to Farrow’s handmade vectors mapping ancient frescoes; these ruins are made through deliberate, artificial means to mimic the genuinely ancient, forming “charming scenes of

devastation” (Schaal, 2011) and a threatening sense of dislocation away from original or intended purpose.

Clay signifies an extension of the artist’s own body, a wider attachment to land and

instability, a “personal archaeology” achieved through unpredictable alchemical means. A

Frankensteinian melding of fragments mirrors Farrow’s own dislocated past, lived in an incompleteness between homes, countries, physical spaces. With no images created precisely for this body of work, but rather selectively foraged from the archive of her iPhone camera roll, they are able to only ever give partial insight. The chaos of ruination is romanticised precisely through its inability to provide whole answers: “genuine ancient ruins came very close to romantic feeling.” (Schaal, 2011). The kiln, meanwhile, is omnipresent, welcomed by the artist for its metamorphosing qualities. She grants material offerings to this fiery vessel, within which, despite her initial image-making agency, they transform in multiplicitous, unpredictable ways. She purposely enters into a dialogue between control and letting go, seeking a medium which allows artefacts to emerge with animistic agency of their own, a paradoxically life-giving

unpredictability at the core of the work. Fragments will continue to ruin and re-form over

time, lacking a singular ideal state amidst the push and pull of materiality and imagery,

simultaneously concealing, elevating and dislocating, preserving and destroying, all within a combined exploration of femininity, sexuality, fragility, abjection, and ruination.

Lucia Farrow (Caracas, Venezuela 2000) graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London in 2022. She has exhibited at the Tate Modern, London UK, (2020 Tate Exchange), Kupfer Project, London (2020, 2022), Usual Business Gallery, London (2022), Hartslane Gallery, London (2022), the Barbican Arts Group Trust (2022), CHICA, Phoenix AZ (2024), Des Bains Gallery, London (2024). She was the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Lightning Grant with LACE in 2020. She has been the recent recipient of the DYCP Grant with Arts Council England for an upcoming project commencing this summer at Kupfer Gallery, culminating in her debut London solo show. Her work has been Featured in publications such as Dazed Magazine, Re-Edition Mag, AnOther Mag, Fizzy Mag, Fad Magazine, 1 Granary, and Spittle.