Sonya Lacey’s installation Weekend is a sophisticated treatment of historical source material intricately worked into a project that highlights contemporary issues around information dissemination and access to knowledge. Lacey often focuses on forms of communication and histories related to printing. This project was a form of memorial to the print workers who once bathed in the now empty and disused swimming pool in the St Bride Foundation just off London’s Fleet Street. The St Bride Foundation was a late Victorian philanthropic venture for cultivating good worker citizens and narrowing the gap between work and leisure. For Weekend, Lacey washed and bleached sheets of weekend newspapers that included imagery of water until the content dissolved, turning newsworthy images into indeterminate forms that were made into pale-coloured collages and reconfigured finally as filmic abstractions. Weekend is a beautifully realised project incorporating 16mm film, a four-channel digital film, delicate sculptural items and printed matter. This process of translation and mediation follows Lacey’s ongoing interest in the fluidity and materiality of language, and the instability of information systems.
– jury statement
Sonya Lacey, Weekend, 2018–2021
Presently showing as part of:
The 10th Walters Prize 2021
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Until 5 September 2021
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki