Lucienne Rickard is an extraordinarily talented artist from Hobart whose work is marked by a sharp eye for detail, zealous imagination and a fastidious, almost obsessive, mode of execution. Lucienne explores themes such as beauty, death, brutality and obsession with some works considering the gradual accumulative death and others, the aggressive chasing and confronting of death. However, as Lucienne explains, “the drawings are also meant to reflect a kind of reverence for the complexity and beauty in the way living things are structured.” Lucienne has become well known for her extraordinary works on drafting film, using laboriously controlled and repetitive pencil strokes that captured the velvety textures of bird, beast, leaf and fabric. Her drawing process continues to evolve and the idea of the impression on a surface is an important one for her and is exemplified across other aspects of her practice. As well as pencil, she also works in biro, ink and charcoal, often using non-traditional techniques to apply marks upon paper, such as hammering, finger printing and taking impressions from old fabrics. The marks of her hand, the smudges of her finger prints upon the paper are reminder of the artist’s journey. Of her work Lucienne says, “There is something Samuel Beckett-y about the making of them. The process is repetitive, arduous and often seems ridiculous and insane to me. I feel like this kind of over-investment suits the subject matter – the death thing.” In all of her works, Lucienne presents the viewer with richly detailed, textured and challenging works that are hauntingly beautiful in both execution and composition.
Lucienne Rickard completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Queensland College of Art in 2001 and, in the following year, Honours (First Class) in Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania. Having completed her PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania and been awarded the Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency in Paris, she has had work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia. Lucienne has exhibited with Beaver Galleries since 2010, with successful showings at both the Sydney Contemporary and Melbourne Art Fairs. In 2014, she was selected to participate in “Primavera”, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual showing of bold new work from young Australian artists and, in 2018, included in the Art Gallery of NSW Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial. Starting in 2019 and extending for a few years, Lucienne undertook a project at the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery where, for weeks on end, she would draw in painstaking detail a recently extinct species of animal or plant and then erase the drawing before starting another. Using the same piece of paper over and over again, the result is a gradual wearing down that captures the marks and indents of loss, leaving only traces of what was once there. Lucienne’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and the University of Tasmania.
