Katy Lucas

My practice is informed by the experience of caving. I examine landscape as a subject through contemporary painting and drawing by engaging with enquiries into its inner structures and material forms. My work is led directly by personal experiences of entering and engaging with subterranean landscape. Caving exemplifies this through both literal and non-physical exchanges with the stratigraphy and surfaces that form the northern English landscape, where I question and re-examine my locality and topographical familiarity. My studio work extends from the cave, re-experiencing and translating the layered, immersive bodily encounters with material time through haptic contact with the subterranean landscape. 

The works of contemporary painter Simon Callery and contemporary drawer Stefan Gant, who collaborate with field archaeology, offer a transferable language between working in and within the landscape and an artistic practice. My work does not necessarily depict the landscape itself but rather the material processes in the cave that led to the formations and features that I find so fascinating. 

How and why my practice has developed is because of my time in caves. The experience of being in the dark, wading through cold water off the Yorkshire moors guided only by a torch, camera in hand is a profoundly intimate way to engage directly with the landscape. Caving offered an opportunity to re-examine the northern landscape, not just surface topography but also inner interfaces, questioning human relationships with sites containing ‘deep’ time. My work is more relational to physical and structural geology. Ideas of erosion, cementation, sedimentation and speleothem – like stalactites and stalagmites, which are formed by water “dripping, seeping, or splashing” – are key.  

Painting is integral. My paintings are almost sedimentary in their construction and mimic painterly secretions, akin to chemical weathering processes  and secreted deposits within cave systems. All my work contains the time in the cave and the ‘deep’ material time which is established through the build-up of marks over time.