LACKNESS

2009

LOU HUBBARD

The publication was made by the artist for the exhibition Lackness presented by Gertrude Contemporary in 2009. 

“When I clapped eyes on the ring, a gift, it was an engorgement - gorgeous like a blood blister. And I knew I had to remove it from the head, like removing a tick from the family dog.”

In 2009, Gertrude Contemporary presented an installation and video work entitled LACKNESS by Lou Hubbard, whose lateral and poetic approach to materials and their arrangements had received critical acclaim throughout Australasia.

Employing domestic and personal objects Hubbard constructed room-scape installations that appeared to embody a hidden narrative as well as evoking visceral responses in the viewer. Through drawing attention to the formal, spatial and emotional properties of her chosen materials, Hubbard’s installations were both extremely tense and deeply reflective.

As a glass light shade and a cooking pot were inverted to become supports for a glass shower screen and floorlamp, the tension between transparency and illumination became acute. Described by Hubbard as “a spine of tumours under the lights of an operating theatre”, Hubbard invited the viewer to enjoy her objects free from any directed association. She allowed them to become imbued with allegory and metaphor in a way that proved as slippery and unconscious as the objects are fixed and concrete.

This beautiful articulation of constraint was accompanied by a catalogue, which employed the language of anatomical pathology to annotate the potential alive within these materials. 

Lou Hubbard received her MFA by research at RMIT University in 2001 and has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia as well as in Hong Kong, Edinburgh and New Zealand since 1977. 

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