Lucy Skaer
Lucy Skaer (born 1975) is a contemporary English artist who works with sculpture, film, painting, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Skaer is a member of the Henry VIII’s Wives artist collective, and has exhibited a number of works with the group. She currently lives and works in Glasgow and London. Early life and education. Skaer was born in Cambridge. She studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. Work. Lucy Skaer's works often depicts relationships between abstraction and the direct material nature of objects. Many of her works are replicas of historical objects  which are translated and re-contextualized in new mediums. Skaer's work has had a particularly strong engagement with images and historical objects depicting archaeology, ecology, the English landscape, British Empire, and Neolithic architecture as her 2008 installation, "The Siege". Much of Skaer's work also consists of objects which interact with and change public spaces. In one piece, she took up a paving stone on Glasgow's Buchanan Street and then had the Earl of Glasgow ceremoniously lay down a replacement, while in an Amsterdam-based piece, she left a diamond and a scorpion side-by-side on a  pavement. She has also secretly hidden moth and butterfly pupae in criminal courts in the hope that they will hatch in mid-trial. In 2003, Skaer was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize. In 2008, Skaer was the subject of a retrospective of her works since 2001 at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland which included newly commissioned work, and a comprehensive monograph book was published to accompany the show. In April 2009, Skaer was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize for the sculptures "Black Alphabet", (26 slender sculptures made of coal dust in the shape of Constantin Brâncuși 's "Bird in Space"), and "Leviathan Edge", an installation which included the skull of a sperm whale, drawings, and sculptures. (She lost out to Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright). Skaer has made a number of 16mm films with the British artist Rosalind Nashashibi including "Flash in the Metropolitan" in 2006, which depicts the artifacts and artworks of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as they appeared in a dimmed light of the museum interrupted by the flashes of a strobe. The two have collaborated on the films "Our Magnolia" and "Pygmalion Event," as well as several others