Lucy Mulholland’s practice playfully investigates connections and exchanges between humans and other species in nature. Working on two interconnected but distinct bodies of work, she has explores relationships between humans and species regarded as ‘companions’ and contrasts this with species considered as ‘pests’, and the implications of such distinctions. Her work explores the boundary between ‘wildness’ and ‘domesticity’ and the misunderstandings and shortcomings we encounter when we try to adapt ‘human spaces’ to facilitate their use by other species. Lucy choses to focus on actions or gestures that may seem insignificant or futile, and instead views them as catalysts for potential future action. Without ignoring the complexities of our current ecological crisis, she views sculpture as a way of exploring gestures of interspecies kinship, and presents this as a humble, yet hopeful step, towards a possible post anthropocentric future.
Lucy Mulholland
Bio
Cat Ladder, is a site specific sculpture made in response to the architecture of ‘human spaces,’ and is a nod to the changes needed to adapt these spaces in order to facilitate their use by other species.
Care and confusion translates a gesture made by my cat as he ran across the piano, into a physical object. Exploring the process of translation itself and how elements inevitably are changed or lost, both literally and it also caused by a fundamental misinterpretation of his action and my understanding of it. The choice to make an integrated music box and wheelbarrow was influenced by Yi-Fu Tuan’s book Dominance and Affection. Tuan explains the conceptual links between pet ownership and tending to a garden, which is a dichotomy of both care and control.
Monument to Hope and Futility celebrates the simple act of letting a fly out of a window. Influenced by Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘odd kin’, the fly has become a motif of victory or hope within my work.
Meeting place is a life-sized pine dining table with four beech chairs, which have been repetitively drilled to create a habitat for solitary insects. The work will be presented in the ECA grounds for the duration of the show, alongside a mixture of flowers and herbs such as lavender, sedum, rosemary, thyme and chives, in planters outside the ECA Café.
Compost for the future addresses the notion that kinship with non-humans is integral to our future. By championing the fly’s role in decomposition, the fly itself becomes an agent of change and hope, transforming our shared violent histories and offering us something new.
Acknowledgement
A special thank-you to Douglas Chatham, Catriona Gilbert, Uist Corrigan, Chris Britee-Steer and the other ECA technicians; without your continuous support none of this would have been possible.
Lucy Mulholland
Related student work
