Lucy Skaer

Lucy Skaer was born in Cambridge in 1975 and lives and works in Glasgow. 

Working across a range of media, with sculpture and drawing at the heart of her practice, Lucy Skaer transforms objects and images through manipulation, repetition, and shifts in scale, moving between the recognizable and the abstract. She works through fragments, replicas, distortions, and quotations, drawing on encounters, research, and a sustained fascination with art history. Inspired by the relationship between reality and the sublime, Skaer seeks to reveal something essential in the objects and materials she works with, using them to offer new perspectives on the past. Her works explore how we make meaning from things we know and value: press photographs reproducing famous works of art, enlarged and redrawn; excerpts from old films manipulated until they become abstract; scattered fragments recomposed; and everyday objects reduced to the imprint of their form. 

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Skaer developed new research using materials including wood, terracotta, and marble. Her project involved reproducing a simple form, with each sculpture based on the one before it rather than on the original source—a piece of wood taken directly from a tree trunk. As the form was reproduced from one sculpture to the next, subtle changes accumulated, creating a continuous progression toward abstraction. The idea extended into language: each sculpture was given a title that was a synonym of the title of the preceding work, echoing the way a rumor is passed from one person to another. By combining materials from different periods and traditions, Skaer created deliberately anachronistic juxtapositions. Rather than exact copies, the sculptures became successive interpretations, questioning the relationship between form, material, language, and representation.