Lucy Gill
Mastication
2023
apple fruit leather, steel, 5,2”x 18”x 30”
Artist statement
In Mastication, Gill slowly preserves and dehydrates apples to create a new skin out of fruit pulp. Through the repetitive labour of producing fruit leather, they have fabricated a draping form that hangs upon a steel frame the size of their body. By anthropomorphizing a natural and accessible food product, Gill questions the potential matter that composes a body proposing a different kind of humanness to claim space. Simultaneously, the ambiguity of this porous skin departs from a purely human experience by involving the experiences of an apple, a table, a sunbather, a drying rack, and the scent of cinnamon in the air.
The main body of the work is accompanied by a smaller sculpture, offering edible tokens of fruit leather to visitors. Gill invites them to open their mouths, ingest this piece of material, and contemplate how it feels to put part of the work into their own body. What does it mean for them to see an anthropomorphic form and to cannibalize it? The taste, smell, and texture place the visitor inside the work while the work is inside the visitor: the work unravels in the folds of viewer's their body.
Artist’s biography
Lucy Gill is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and painting, with a specific interest in textiles and food-based materials. They are interested in creating alternative and perishable bodies from organic materials, calling attention to non-human life through sustainably sensitive work. Through material and conceptual exploration, Gill’s work questions the ways in which human bodies are privileged over all else, both living and non-living.
Gill is currently completing a BFA in Sculpture from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and holds a Diploma of Fine Arts from Langara College in Vancouver. They have been in numerous group exhibitions in Montréal including Peinture Fraîche et Nouvelle Construction 19e édition at Art Mûr (2023), Antécedent aux Formes Futures at Ateliers Belleville (2023), Rem-i-nis-cence at Art Matters Festival (2023), What Is Not But Could Be If at ART3 Gallery (2022), amongst others. Recently, Gill participated in the REM 1% Public Art and Sustainability project in Place des Aiguilleurs, Griffintown (2023) and a collaborative ephemeral Public Art installation in Parc Jean-Drapeau (2023).
