Lucy Gunning
(1964 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Lucy Gunning |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Newcastle of Tyne, England |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1964 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
multi-media |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Video artist
Multi-media sculpture
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Biography
In 1996, video and film artist Lucy Gunning was one of three women among the thirteen artists in Offside: Contemporary Artists and Football held at Manchester City Art Gallery. Gunning's video The Footballers was filmed in the exhibition space. It showed two women kicking a ball, wearing white clothes that looked like a cross between dresses and doctors' coats (one was also sporting shin pads). Their 'play' brought the beautiful game into the hallowed home of high culture, and also recalled the surprisingly long and often overlooked history of women's football, the femininity of the 'players' being emphasized by their strange football strip.
In much of Gunning's work, women are the focus. In Climbing Around My Room {1993), a girl circles a space. Shuffling along shelves, scaling a wardrobe, she loops the loop, only to begin again. The action recalls childhood games, but also invokes a sense of domestic claustrophobia; she cannot break the circuit shaped by the room she occupies. In The Horse Impressionists (1994), Gunning tracks down women who mimic horses, and films them snorting, stamping and rearing. Again, the fantastic pleasure of such childhood games is invoked, particularly for girls, who sometimes develop an intense love of horses during their teenage years.
In the catalogue of Gunning's exhibition at the Chapter Art Gallery, Cardiff in 1998, curator Denise Riley evaluated her place in contemporary art. Gunning extends a line running from Minimalism's subversion of the monumentality of sculpture through to Bruce Nauman's video works. Riley argued that Gunning's particular contribution lay in addressing the exclusion of the feminine from language (something which she even represents literally - women are often wordless, but can grunt or neigh}. Gunning's work explores the gap between the constraints shaping actions, and a wider field of possibility or fantasy. Since graduating from Falmouth School of Art and Goldsmiths, Gunning's art has been seen in a series of solo exhibitions at Mart's Gallery, London, and in the USA. |
Samples of Work
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