Lucy Raven: Depositions
To coincide with a monumental museum exhibition by Lucy Raven in The Curve space at the Barbican (until 4 January) – including her film Murderers Bar (2025), exploring the largest dam removal project in North American history – the American artist shows a new body of related works called Depositions at Lisson Street. These ethereal, translucent panels resemble cross-sections of the mountainsides or panoramic views of the same valleys she shot in California and are physically created from the same material – sand, mud, cement, salt water and other debris – through an intense process of pressure and release. By constructing a large steel and wooden channel lined with expanses of silk, Raven staged smaller-scale floods and dam breaches in a studio environment, before revealing the aftermath, traced as sedimentary imprints or chance echoes on the fabric sidewalls.
Partly made as testbeds for the underwater sections of the film’s journey downstream once the dam had been dynamited, the Depositions are themselves records of dramatic geological change, created by the dynamic forces of these semi-controlled dam breaches. The varying weights of water, soil, gravity and the inevitable slippages and landslides, have all been recorded as archaeological layers of stratified riverbed material, seemingly through natural processes and without human interference. The resulting forms might be read as landscape paintings, drawings or likened to performance documentation, but could also obliquely refer to the proto-photographic images supposedly left on funerary or burial cloths by dead bodies, such as the much-discussed Turin Shroud, as well as to art historical depictions of the deposition of the body of Christ from the cross.
Read moreUpstairs, a three-screen video, Dam Breach LIC (2024), captures glimpses of the apparatus Raven constructed around the Depositions and the material transformations of mud and water that eventually left their marks on the gauzy fabric, before being stretched and mounted onto metallic armatures that allow them to hang both on and off the walls.
After the Barbican, Lucy Raven: Rounds will travel to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in May 2026. Murderers Bar is on show at The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto (until 22 March 2026).
Richard Long
Having first made work in the natural world over 50 years ago, Richard Long has since documented his very personal and physical encounters with landscape through varied materials and means. For this presentation a wall-based text work Dustlines (1995) accompanies a sculpture of found timber, Driftwood Line (1983). The words describe one of Long’s ritualistic wilderness walks, along the old trade route of the Camino Real, which once linked Mexico City to New Mexico. Only the mind’s eye can now delineate the dust path he made by dragging and scuffing his boots alongside the Rio Grande over the course of a week, as this inherently auto-destructive work also contains and collapses around itself historical ideas linked to conceptual art, land art and performance art, all subsumed into one simple act of walking in a landscape. In addition to sharing the experience of his walks through text, here Long brings raw matter from outside in the form of driftwood washed up by the River Avon.
John Latham
Beginning in the 1970s until his final works in 2005, conceptual British artist John Latham was deeply inspired by the physical form of the red peaks, some isolated, some grouped, rising out of the lowland plains near Edinburgh in Scotland. These were actually waste heaps of shale left behind after mining and extraction of hydrocarbons at the surface. Latham likened one group of these human-made mounds to a giant, reclining female form and considered it a monumental work of ‘Derelict Land art’, which he dubbed the Niddrie Woman. This series of glass, sand and book sculptures titled The N-U Niddrie Heart (1991) constitute the ‘heart’ of this prone figure. Originally incorporating 37 elements, the installation is both a metaphor for the survival of Mother Earth (the embedded books include The Pregnancy Survival Manual and Vanished Species) as well as a metaphorical tribute to Latham’s efforts to preserve Niddrie Woman, with each material representing a different timescale of decay, erosion or permanence. The two stretched and strangulated paintings, Canvas Events (1994-95), were Latham’s attempts at capturing not only the immediacy and shortest possible time period of creation, using spray paint, but also the infinity of the cosmos and the unknowable portions of the canvases, held forever mid-twist.
About Lisson Street
At the gallery's iconic Lisson Street space, we introduce a season of presentations which will shift thematically through the year in conversation with our wider global programme. Combining single-artist projects, archival exhibits and group displays, complemented by talks and multi-disciplinary activations, Lisson Street breaks with conventional exhibition cycles as a dynamic response to the constantly multiplying pathways of contemporary art practice. Inaugurating this winter with a series of engagements with the natural world inspired by Lucy Raven, collated under the title Landscope, the first Lisson Street season explores radically distinct takes on artists’ relationships with landscape as seen through different lenses and varied focuses, from memory and dreams to history, literature and the physicality of material.
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