Lucy Mullican is a conceptual artist. She creates using a wide range of media, including drawings made with homemade natural artisan pigments and paintings made with mineral watercolours applied directly onto wood panels. She received a BFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019 and in 2022 her work was exhibited at Olympia in New York City in a solo show titled, Sensed As Well As Seen. Nature, land, water and sky are central themes of Mullican’s works.
Lucy Mullican’s studio in Brixton is a room taller than it is wide with a wall of windows that look like they need a good shove to budge open. Lucy is wearing a red blouse, the sleeves of which billow out as she flies towards a particular painting. “Don’t, don’t look at this one. This one isn’t done yet.”
Knowing full well the icky feeling of showing work prematurely, I try to look elsewhere. But my curiosity continuously returns to the thing Lucy is trying her best to hide, to ingest. It’s a landscape of sorts, a kind of cross-section of Earth and Sky, and cleaving through the layers is a“strip” about three inches wide. At a glance, the strip appears colorless and effulgent, like a beam of light when it pierces through a break in the clouds.
Minutes later, Lucy and I find ourselves on an enclosed ledge accessed by one of the windows (it did need a good shove). It is the height of summer and rush hour. We share a cigarette.
LUCY: So every time I go into the studio the past few weeks something is really wrong with that landscape and for me, it is a really traditional landscape: You have the sky, you have what is going on underneath. I did this series a while ago called Home Under the Ground. It was like these kind of falls that were going down. But they also looked like homes. And I was trying to recreate that but it just became so…I don’t know. Flat. It’s been flat and so I’ve put a strip down the middle, but it is still flat. So, I have to change the tone of the piece altogether in order for me to feel somewhat satisfied or to feel the body, because now you can’t feel the body and that’s kind of where I need to go.
Right before you came I was thinking about maybe putting red down the middle, maybe bringing red into the background, maybe making darker colors, maybe also making the veil a little separated rounding the edges so you are more inside of it rather than kind of viewing it from the outside. I want you to be able to feel like you are behind the veil going in. And I know it is needed, that big strip, in order for me to completely change it because I was looking at it and every day just not happy with it. But I think this is going to be a really important piece, at least if I can fuck it up and change it completely. At least I am in the motion of trouble that we need to be in.
Revisionist: Motion of trouble. So difficult to be in that space where something unknown can happen. Terrifying.
LUCY: It’s really terrifying and this is also a point where I am now being really vulnerable and I need to be really vulnerable and push it to a place where I don’t even know. But I am also getting the juices flowing and excited too. It is going to be a build-up and it is a relationship, you know. It’s this relationship that I am just about to start and embark on. Even half-hour before you came, that’s when I put the strip down.
I made that step because I can’t live with this sky/ground anymore because I don’t feel anything from it. I need to bring the body in. And that’s a big part of my work is bringing the body and the landscape together. It’s a feeling. It’s all about a feeling.
Revisionist: You referenced your past work and I think we often outgrow work, maybe even sooner than we would like to. It’s almost like, “No wait, can I please just keep making this stuff that was fulfilling me not that long ago.” It’s like what was our motion of trouble yesterday becomes our comfort zone today and we have to just keep pushing that boundary further and further out. But how do you persevere through that because I think that constant work is enough to stop people from going deeper?
LUCY: It’s just about putting in time. My work has a lot to do with the ghost and spirit and loss as well. And signs. Because we all have signs that will point us where we need to be. I was with a friend the other day and he took me to this secret spot that he loves in Battersea and we sat by the water and we were talking about everything, life, and I was talking about loss and about spirit and right when we got to a point, a shoe floated down the river and landed exactly where I was sitting. It was a sign. And then around 40 minutes later another shoe came right there and landed in the same spot, a very sad black shoe. I always take photos of single shoes wherever I go because I’m always curious about their pair. It’s a ghost that has lost its pair.
Revisionist: But also you are a twin.
LUCY: I am a twin—
Revisionist:—You are a pair.
LUCY: I am a pair, exactly. There is another half of me. There’s another half that’s here, that’s present, but figuring out that relationship as well. It is all intertwined. So when signs like this come, that’s where the work can also continue to go and I can get the energy I need in order to make. And my friend said, ‘Lucy, I know you are struggling a little bit with the work but don’t go into the studio right now, take like four days and just think about this and walk around and then enter in at your own pace.’
Revisionist: Really beautiful advice. I think we can get tunnel-vision with work that isn’t working. It can be frustrating. And actually the thing we need to do is so counter-intuitive to our culture which is don’t focus on the work. Go be in the world, experience the world. And you are so sensitive to the world. You are so attuned to signs.
LUCY:So switched on.
Revisionist: Have you cultivated that?
LUCY: It’s always been like that for me since I was a child. It’s always been. That’s why I’ve been thinking about this since I was a baby and that’s why I can continue with it because it is so ingrained. There is no separation at all.
Revisionist: Did you ever question being an artist as you were growing up?
LUCY: Yeah, I guess there was a point probably when I was 17/18 when people asked what I did and I was like, you know, I like to draw, but I was always doing it naturally, it wasn’t like ‘I have to sit down and I have to do it.’ It was just an everyday thing. And then at one point that turned and people would ask me what I do and I would say I’m an artist. There’s no question about it. There’s no resistance to it. It is very firm and it’s right.
Revisionist: So you don’t feel the kind of weight of that label as “artist” to fulfill expectations or produce work?
LUCY: Yeah, no I never felt that. But that’s because it’s like, you’re on the street and this is the way you view the world. You can see something on the street and that’s just how your brain works and it is about being able to exist in the world and say this is how I exist in the world. It’s not like I come into the studio and now I am an artist and when I leave, I am not. Even so, working at a cafe, my world would continue. It would operate exactly in the same way no separation whatsoever. And so I know that’s it. It’s always been. There’s no second thought.
After I left her studio, Lucy sent me a photo of the painting. She had gone right back to work, changing the shape of the strip and adding a sliver of red and I thought about how the act of creating is just one constant experiment aimed at getting closer to something ineffable. Sure, one can admire craft and technique which are essential tools to the process, but to land something creatively is part discipline part miracle. And we tend to overestimate the former and underestimate the latter.
Perhaps Paul Auster said it best in an online interview hosted by the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. He said that “the essence of being an artist is to confront the thing you’re trying to do—to tackle it head on. And if, in wrestling with these things, you manage to make something that is good, well, it will have it’s own beauty, but it’s not a kind of beauty that you can predict.”