Lucy Soni
Lucy Soni is one of those artists who i follow closely online, so I was delighted when she agreed to have me over for a studio visit.
She says ‘ i’m always asking what is a painting?’ This enquiry into both what is a painting and the nature of painting itself fuels her work. In 2018 her work was part of the prestigious John Moores Liverpool exhibition. Here she showed her work deconstructed as bunting. The words ‘The Stars are Aligned’ written across the bunting was a thought from a moment in time as a teenager wondering what the future would hold.
We talked about the work i most know her for which is the doodles or scribbles cut out and made into objects. It references the ideas that these drawings we all make, are made at times of disconnect and something to do, for example when we are on the phone or in a meeting and our attention isn’t 100% on the task, our hands move and busy themselves, swirls and shapes with biro appear on the corners of whatever paper is at hand. Soni flips this and makes it intentional, and then diligently with a scalpel cuts out the shapes to create objects.
She is interested in waste and again this points to the above work by way of presenting the ideas that what is waste to some is useful, precious or beautiful to another and worth holding on to.
The work took 3d form for a while when she created large textile forms echoing the 2d drawings. Fabric was painted and sewn into upholstered entwining forms. It was a natural evolution of her work as the materials themselves were also salvaged fabrics discarded by a local events company. “The handmade is important in my work. The paintings that I showed in Miami in Dec 2019 have a precision to them but i don’t use masking tape and if you look closely you will be able to see they are painted freehand and perhaps not as 'perfect’ as they appear from a distance. I don’t try to conceal that, I want to show evidence of the artist as maker’.
More recently her focus has become the stretched canvas as a source of enquiry into the nature of what is a painting. Taking apart the traditional frame, she paints the canvas on the floor of her studio. ‘ I was cleaning brushes one day and surprised to see how much pigment was still in the brisltes as I cleaned it, so i started to clean the brushes on bits of canvas i had lying around; moving the brush to transfer any paint onto the fabric before I took it to the tap or the turps. Again it was an interest in waste that made me do that but i was left with was some pieces of canvas with paint on them so they have an interesting textural quality. I took the canvas and started wrapping it around the stretcher bars and felt I was onto something.”
What i loved about these pieces was both the accidental, experimental approach but then how the bars are wrapped in the painted canvas very precisely, with sharp pleats and folds. This again lets her work oscilate between unexpected and deliberate. These art works are an arrangement of covered bars of different lengths and suspended at different heights. “i wanted to make wall hanging art as this is what is expected of a painting so it is a nod to that tradition” she says.
I brought up the arrangement of the bars, referring to composition as another tenet of painting. It’s a critical part of how these art pieces succeed or fail. The negative spaces between them are as significant as the the solid bars. Removing a bar changes everything and suddenly the work can feel flat or unresolved.
“I’m very interested in negative space“ said Lucy, and this is also evident in the scribble pieces with their cut out voids. When we look back at her output we can see the investigation into negative space was there all along. As this new body of work develops and the artist continues to explore the I look forward to seeing where it goes.
Lucy originally studied at Chelsea School of Art and returned to art education at Turps in 2018. She says the community, peer group, crits, mentoring and space to explore and expand have been significantly helpful in the development of her work.