theCOLAB presents ‘It’s All Kicking Off’, Lucy Gregory’s invitation to the viewer to become both engine and performer in the surreal mechanisms of her kinetic sculptural collage.  Its movement is reminiscent of a perpetual cancan, the disreputable dance that emerged in defiance of oppressive nineteenth century values which prevented women from showing their ankles or being out of breath.  With cartoonish licence and a dose of slapstick humour, Gregory has flattened images of legs to create a work that is simultaneously both two and three dimensional, static and in movement. It kicks high in joyous defiance of artistic categories and conventions with viewer as accomplice.  

This work continues Gregory’s staging of collaborations between both bodies and machines using imagery drawn from historical photographic techniques and optical devices such as the zoetrope to create ‘analogue GIFs for the post-internet world’.

For your safety:
Do not step into the frame of the artwork.
Please ensure children are closely supervised near the work and when operating the cranks.  Not suitable for use by small children. This is a sculpture, not a toy.  Please treat it with respect and be gentle.  

About Lucy Gregory

Lucy Gregory (b. London, 1994 ) graduated from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, 2016 and The Royal College of Art, Sculpture, 2018. She creates large-scale, figurative ‘kinetic collages’ that rely on audience participation to activate surreal mechanisms. The viewer becomes the engine, activator and performer, intertwined within the fabric of the work itself. Sculptures take inspiration from real world events and narratives, hierarchies of power or nod to the way we consume images in a post internet world.

Lucy won the Ingram Prize and her work is now part of the Ingram Collection. She received the Gilbert Bayes Trust Studio Grant and the RCA Arts & Humanities Art Criticism Prize, and won the People’s Choice Award for the National Sculpture Prize. She has exhibited at Bold Tendencies, MK Gallery, Christie’s Auction House, as well as being included as a finalist in the 2021 Robert Walters UK New Artist of the Year Award at the Saatchi Gallery.

About the Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

MARY MARY and The Artist’s Garden is realised in partnership with and supported by Westminster City Council and private philanthropists with support from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant for Rong Bao’s Yellow Path and with the kind permission of LUL/Transport for London. With thanks to WSP UK, Frieze 91 and Mezcal Reina for their support.

For more information, images or to arrange an interview please contact Mary Doherty / mary@sam-talbot.com.