The Blame Game

About

A bold, interactive kinetic sculptural installation.

Walk into the navy blue colour field to encounter six-eight surreal, theatrical, photographic cut-outs of pointed fingers mounted on pendulums, poised in balance waiting to be activated by the viewer.

The pendulums are set in motion and the cartoon-like fingers satirically mock each other with every swing on the axle creating a slapstick exaggerated finger wag. These larger-than-life kinetic collages create the feeling you are walking into an animation, from an uncanny world of clunky mechanical Victorian toys and fairground games in a bizarre collision between bodies and machines. The Blame Game, despite its dry humour, is inspired by the political agendas of recent times, and the 6-8 sculptures will be positioned through the space so that they are all blaming each other, pointing fat fingers across the room in different directions with no obvious resolution.

Each pendulum is swinging with its own rhythm and momentum, the squeaks and clunks from the mechanisms add to the character of each sculpture. As the energy dissipates they become still again one by one. The cutouts are also mounted on a hook, so within the momentum of the pendulum moving side to side, the pointed fingers will also swing more freely, giving it a more theatrical choreography and punctuation. 

LUCY GREGORY

Lucy Gregory (b. London) graduated from the The Ruskin School of Art, 2016 and The Royal College of Art (Sculpture) , 2018. Exploring the theatricality of flatness, she creates large-scale ‘kinetic collages’ that rely on audience participation to activate surreal mechanisms. 
(Gregory’s sculptural environments play with a collision between bodies and machines to create the feeling you are walking into an animation – referencing the body and its flexible instability flattened on screen, and the violent slapstick humour of cartoons. )
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. She recently exhibited at Bold Tendencies, Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer with Brooke Benington Gallery, MK Gallery, Daniel Benjamin Gallery and was included in the HIX Prize, FBA Futures and the Affordable Art Fair’s Recent Graduates’ Exhibition.