Muscle Memory

28 Sep-23 Nov 2024

Overview

We are pleased to invite you to Muscle Memory, the first solo show by British artist Lucy Gregory, who will transform the Stables Gallery into a vibrant ‘factory’ of kinetic sculptures from 28 September to 23 November 2024. Gregory invites the audience to become both engine and performer in the surreal mechanisms of her kinetic sculptural ‘collages’ which playfully collide bodies and machines. 

With cartoonish license and a dose of slapstick humour, the exhibition is underpinned by a key theme of repetition—exploring repeated gestures and emphasizing looping body language through mechanics to imply encoded behaviours or messages within society interwoven within power structures. Kinetic sculptures become comedic caricatures of the political landscape. 

Gregory is also interested in how we consume images and our dwindling attention spans in the digital age, which have now been proven to be shorter than a goldfish. Inspired by the screen, Gregory plays with ‘flatness’ by using a range of sheet materials and larger-than-life photographic cut outs that occupy an uncanny space between 2D and 3D. 

The name of the show, Muscle Memory, references the hypnotic looping and repeated gestures of the mechanical works. This is overlaid with references to the history of photography—Eadweard Muybridge and Victorian rudimentary animation and optical devices such as zoetropes. We are almost returning full circle to the present day, as sculptures form analogue ‘GIFs’ in the post-internet world.