Pushing boundaries of gender expectations

An example of Sarah Lucas' work which is on display at Two Rooms. Photo / Supplied

From Isaac Julien to Kevin Appel, artists from different parts of the world have held residences at Two Rooms during previous Auckland Arts Festivals. This year, the Newton gallery hosts Holloway-born sculptor and photographer Sarah Lucas, who will be mounting her infamous Nuds installation.

"There's just a few days to go now," she declares. "I'm feeling really excited about it. I haven't been to New Zealand before. But I have a bunch of Kiwi friends, who are mostly in London but some have returned home, so I don't feel completely unconnected to the place."

Like much of her earlier work, Nuds plays on gender expectations. "I like pushing the boundaries whether that's by wearing trousers or not wearing make-up," says Lucas, who doesn't believe masculine and feminine roles have fundamentally altered over the past few decades.

"Men and women haven't really changed and a lot of what we consider meaningful and rich in this life is founded upon that difference. I question how different we really are, apart from the obvious presence or absence of a knob. That is the endless question and in that sense nothing's changed."

Nuds grew out of Lucas' penchant for messing around with stuffed tights.

"The first one was a screwed-up Bunny, a sexy, leg-like sculpture incorporating a chair that had been abandoned for some years," she says. "I don't know why but there was an interval before I realised its potential was as a mystery, or, perhaps, a lapse of thinking or looking. In this case, it's more to do with recognition than having an idea."

Lucas is shipping six pieces to Auckland and will be making some new sculptures while she is here. "I'm arriving about a month before the show opens, so I'll have the chance to see the gallery and to do some travelling about both the North and South Island. There will be a bunch of New Zealand Nuds, which I guess will be strangely imbued with some New Zealand vibration, although I don't know quite how yet. I'm also looking forward to seeing some Maori art. The Nuds themselves are primitives."

The show combines her interest in sexual puns and stiff-lipped British attitudes, although Lucas insists it is not influenced by kiss-me-quick hats and bawdy postcards. "The idea that my work relates to saucy seaside humour came about when I was making sculptures using fruit and vege as male and female attributes," she laughs. "It wasn't something I was thinking about, although the sculptures have a lewd and colourful air about them. Humour is about negotiating the contradictions thrown up by convention and, to a certain extent, it's interchangeable with seriousness otherwise it wouldn't be funny or devastating. But the Nuds are not ironic at all and they don't refer to other art or reference anything except themselves. They're like self-absorbed, peculiar nymphs in a kind of netherworld."

Lucas thrives on the opportunity sculpture provides for getting your hands dirty. "I find it very direct," she says. "Of course, the materials themselves have all sorts of meanings and associations as well as the stuff of them."

Having graduated in 1989, Lucas was in the ranks of the Young British Artists movement of rising talents in 1992 alongside the likes of Damian Hirst and Tracy Emin. "It's been an amazing time, looking back at how much has happened that I couldn't have dreamed up," she says. "Except I suppose we did dream it up, more or less, collectively.

"It gives you a strong sense of being active in creating your own reality, which I sometimes believe we did. But it doesn't always feel like that. We all know the difference between a good day and a bad day. Breakthroughs are only temporary. We keep coming back to the same point; only it's not the same point. The trick is to take the opportunity to look at things differently, to change ourselves."

Auckland Arts Festival

Who: British artist Sarah Lucas

Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, March 4-April 9