So it goes

Lucienne Rickard’s drawings come to life through an obsessive and laborious process. Beginning with a single mark in graphite on drafting paper, the drawing is built up over a period of months. This somewhat obsessive mode of execution has a highly worked, almost engraved appearance.

Rickard’s work engages themes of beauty, death, brutality and obsession in which the subject matter often recalls disintegration or death. She says “The drawings are also meant to reflect a kind of reverence for the complexity and beauty in the way living things are structured.”

This drawing is from a series that explores the psychological and physical violence of ‘blood sports’ such as bull fighting, boxing and dog fights, a memento mori of sorts. While the drawings represent loss, struggle, combat and ultimately death, their opulent and beautiful surfaces shimmer, capturing and reflecting light in the manner of a living thing.