PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2019
Lucy Helton (Brooklyn)
“Lucy Helton's project is an interplay of the fictitious and futuristic. Her concerns into the environment combines with language technologies-radio and image transmissions for instance - to investigate these issues through a subtle and haunting lens. How to engage an audience that is increasingly desensitized is within her thought process, and more utopian representations have began to emerge in her work. Her most recent images considers the ecosystem and specifically issues of water - pollution, melting and disappearance. Lucy has an experimental and process-oriented approach and will fully make use of Penumbra's facilities. This residency will give her the time, space and practical tools to further develop her project and vision.”
–Yamini Nayar (Artist. Member of the 2019 Jury).
Image © Lucy Helton.
“[…] The fictitious and prophetic landscapes I create subtly address contemporary environmental concerns, by offering a vision of the future that’s both frightening and beautiful. My black and white photographs contain a visual play between the real and the imagined.[…]”
Born in London and based in New York, Lucy Helton received her master’s degree in fine art photography from Hartford Art School, CT, in 2014. Rising from a necessity to express her personal anxieties and concerns about the environment, her first photobook Actions of Consequence was nominated for the MACK First Book Award 2014, shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award 2015, and The Anamorphosis Prize 2015. Her most recent book Transmission (Silas Finch, 2015) is a communication from our future to our recent past and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award 2015. Meditations on the future state of the environment and if human colonies will exist outside planet earth, led to her discovery and fascination with basic image transmission using low energy radio waves. Gaining a HAM radio General Class license, Helton advances these themes in her practice. The resulting artworks test the boundaries of art and technology and continue to question our current path of planetary destruction. Helton’s books are collected by the Cleveland Institute of Art, MoMA, MET, Brooklyn Museum, Houston Center of Photography, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, among others.
