MONIQUE LACEY
b. 1960 Utrecht, Netherlands. l&w. Auckand, NZ/Aotearoa
Beginning with commercially available packaging materials Monique Lacey constructs sculptures that oscillate between the utilitarian and the uncanny. These boxes, once assembled, are submerged beneath successive skins of plaster, pigment, fibreglass, wax and resin. The surface becomes a site of both concealment and disclosure, where the humble cardboard substrate is simultaneously effaced and exalted. Crucially, these structures are not left intact; crushed using Lacey’s own bodyweight, a gesture that straddles violence and play, absurdity and critique.
If Minimalism sought purity and anonymity in industrial materials, Lacey’s work unsettles that legacy. It recalls the “specific object” yet insists on the indexical trace of the maker, present not through heroic gesture, but through acts of calculated defacement. The surfaces refuse the sleek finishes of Judd or Morris, opting instead for a material instability that complicates hierarchies of value. What emerges is a practice that inhabits the space between sculpture and painting, surface and form, ruin and reinvention.
Lacey’s engagement with our post-truth era surfaces most pointedly through her choice of titles. ‘Stable Genius’, ‘Flip Flopper’, and 'Quid Pro Quo’ are not just pulled from political soundbites, but are artefacts of a fractured discourse. In a 24-hour media cycle governed by repetition, contradiction and spin, these phrases circulate less as meaning than as noise - a kind of echo chamber that mirrors the conditions under which we now receive and process information.
For Lacey, figures like Donald Trump emerge not as direct subjects, but as avatars of this condition, and for a moment in history where spectacle eclipses substance, and language itself is destabilised. Trump’s incoherence along with a resistance to fact, all point to a cultural terrain in which the boundaries between sincerity and satire, and truth and fiction are no longer clearly drawn. In this context, Lacey’s titles function like 'glitches in the matrix' - each possessing a snappy soundbite logic that dissolves on contact.
By collapsing political language into sculptural form, Lacey doesn’t resolve this tension insomuch as she materialises it. Her works seem to echo the collapse of certainty itself and in a post-truth-post-capitalist world, these crumpled forms perhaps read less as ruins than as emblems of our uncertain present. Shaped by distortion, dissonance and instability, they mirror the ways we are already living, thinking, and making meaning on a ground that is constantly shifting beneath our feet.
Monique Lacey is represented nationally in Australia by The Renshaws.
b. 1960 Utrecht, Netherlands. l&w. Auckand, NZ/Aotearoa
Beginning with commercially available packaging materials Monique Lacey constructs sculptures that oscillate between the utilitarian and the uncanny. These boxes, once assembled, are submerged beneath successive skins of plaster, pigment, fibreglass, wax and resin. The surface becomes a site of both concealment and disclosure, where the humble cardboard substrate is simultaneously effaced and exalted. Crucially, these structures are not left intact; crushed using Lacey’s own bodyweight, a gesture that straddles violence and play, absurdity and critique.
If Minimalism sought purity and anonymity in industrial materials, Lacey’s work unsettles that legacy. It recalls the “specific object” yet insists on the indexical trace of the maker, present not through heroic gesture, but through acts of calculated defacement. The surfaces refuse the sleek finishes of Judd or Morris, opting instead for a material instability that complicates hierarchies of value. What emerges is a practice that inhabits the space between sculpture and painting, surface and form, ruin and reinvention.
Lacey’s engagement with our post-truth era surfaces most pointedly through her choice of titles. ‘Stable Genius’, ‘Flip Flopper’, and 'Quid Pro Quo’ are not just pulled from political soundbites, but are artefacts of a fractured discourse. In a 24-hour media cycle governed by repetition, contradiction and spin, these phrases circulate less as meaning than as noise - a kind of echo chamber that mirrors the conditions under which we now receive and process information.
For Lacey, figures like Donald Trump emerge not as direct subjects, but as avatars of this condition, and for a moment in history where spectacle eclipses substance, and language itself is destabilised. Trump’s incoherence along with a resistance to fact, all point to a cultural terrain in which the boundaries between sincerity and satire, and truth and fiction are no longer clearly drawn. In this context, Lacey’s titles function like 'glitches in the matrix' - each possessing a snappy soundbite logic that dissolves on contact.
By collapsing political language into sculptural form, Lacey doesn’t resolve this tension insomuch as she materialises it. Her works seem to echo the collapse of certainty itself and in a post-truth-post-capitalist world, these crumpled forms perhaps read less as ruins than as emblems of our uncertain present. Shaped by distortion, dissonance and instability, they mirror the ways we are already living, thinking, and making meaning on a ground that is constantly shifting beneath our feet.
Monique Lacey is represented nationally in Australia by The Renshaws.
Beginning with commercially available packaging materials Monique Lacey constructs sculptures that oscillate between the utilitarian and the uncanny. These boxes, once assembled, are submerged beneath successive skins of plaster, pigment, fibreglass, wax and resin. The surface becomes a site of both concealment and disclosure, where the humble cardboard substrate is simultaneously effaced and exalted. Crucially, these structures are not left intact; crushed using Lacey’s own bodyweight, a gesture that straddles violence and play, absurdity and critique.
If Minimalism sought purity and anonymity in industrial materials, Lacey’s work unsettles that legacy. It recalls the “specific object” yet insists on the indexical trace of the maker, present not through heroic gesture, but through acts of calculated defacement. The surfaces refuse the sleek finishes of Judd or Morris, opting instead for a material instability that complicates hierarchies of value. What emerges is a practice that inhabits the space between sculpture and painting, surface and form, ruin and reinvention.
Lacey’s engagement with our post-truth era surfaces most pointedly through her choice of titles. ‘Stable Genius’, ‘Flip Flopper’, and 'Quid Pro Quo’ are not just pulled from political soundbites, but are artefacts of a fractured discourse. In a 24-hour media cycle governed by repetition, contradiction and spin, these phrases circulate less as meaning than as noise - a kind of echo chamber that mirrors the conditions under which we now receive and process information.
For Lacey, figures like Donald Trump emerge not as direct subjects, but as avatars of this condition, and for a moment in history where spectacle eclipses substance, and language itself is destabilised. Trump’s incoherence along with a resistance to fact, all point to a cultural terrain in which the boundaries between sincerity and satire, and truth and fiction are no longer clearly drawn. In this context, Lacey’s titles function like 'glitches in the matrix' - each possessing a snappy soundbite logic that dissolves on contact.
By collapsing political language into sculptural form, Lacey doesn’t resolve this tension insomuch as she materialises it. Her works seem to echo the collapse of certainty itself and in a post-truth-post-capitalist world, these crumpled forms perhaps read less as ruins than as emblems of our uncertain present. Shaped by distortion, dissonance and instability, they mirror the ways we are already living, thinking, and making meaning on a ground that is constantly shifting beneath our feet.
Monique Lacey is represented nationally in Australia by The Renshaws.
