Thursday, March 8, 2007


Sarah Lucas' "Aunty Jam" (1990's). Lucas often employs metaphors that symbolise sexual body parts. These metaphors are frequently food or furniture which she utilises as ready-mades, attributing new meanings to them. "The message of these works is clearly autobiographical. Lucas's breast-chair has predictable things to say about the role of domestic woman as apiece of furniture, a thing to be sat on; by covering the chair in a layer of cigarettes, the artist presumably means to explain the link between the eternal drudgery of women and their desire to kill themselves slowly with fags. Her life vest, which doubles as a pair of breasts, says much the same kind of thing about the effect on women as sexualised objects. Given the artist's pungent frame of reference, it is probably not going too far to suggest that the covert message of Lucas: life sucks."-- Charles Darwent, The New Statesman (2000).

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