Sarah Lucas and Tekla for House of Voltaire
Tekla is proud to collaborate with Sarah Lucas on a limited edition towel for House of Voltaire, sold to fundraise for the not-for-profit arts organisation Studio Voltaire. The limited edition towel features iconic imagery from Lucas’ ‘Tit Brick’ series, selected by the artist and printed across a cut terry weave.
Over the last three decades, Sarah Lucas has become one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, she is known for her use of everyday materials, transformed into sculptures and installations that confront gender, sexuality, and identity with irreverence and wit.
Born in London in 1962, Lucas studied at the Working Men’s College, London College of Printing and Goldsmiths College, emerging in the early 1990s as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs). Her early work, including photographic self-portraits that positioned her as both subject and provocateur, set the tone for her career. She consistently employs “readymade” objects such as tabloid newspapers, furniture, food and industrial materials to conjure corporeal fragments. The body, in its many guises, is Lucas’s prevailing subject.
In Sarah Lucas’s ‘Tit Brick’ series, first initiated in 2011, a found, functional brick is combined with tights stuffed with kapok (the fluff found inside furniture) and wrought into a suggestive biomorphic form. The disembodied breast simultaneously exudes a sense of the absurd and the allusive, heightened by their positioning on the brut industrial material.
Lucas’s work consistently challenges conventional notions of femininity, sexuality and identity. Her provocative use of ‘tits,’ ‘penises,’ and anthropomorphic ‘bunnies’ exemplifies her distinctive ability to transform symbols of societal objectification into potent emblems of defiance and empowerment. The red brick, with its inherent qualities of strength and durability, also suggests associations with toxic masculinity, while conjuring imagery of the objectification of the female body – the builder catcalling the woman passing a construction site. Through her melding of the distorted breast and the brick, Lucas weaponises the female form, turning it against historical forces of harassment, prejudice and inequality.
Yet humour pervades Lucas’s work, often merged with her stark commentary on the reduction of women’s bodies to sexualised components. In her ‘Tit Brick’ sculptures, the ‘tit’ is playfully dehumanised by being isolated from the female body – much like Lucas’s abstraction of phallic symbols – ultimately questioning the binaries of gender representation while provoking laughter, discomfort and reflection on the accepted associations with particular bodily forms.
Sarah Lucas and Tekla for House of Voltaire Tit Brick Towel © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.