Lucy Tevlin

Lucy Tevlin

Born 1997, June 6 (Hastings, UK)
Website lucytevlin.com

Lucy Tevlin’s art practice is defined by a conceptual approach to image-making. She tends to regard her use of lens based media, be they still, moving, or even devoid of pictorial content – as an opportunity to reflect on the spatial or mechanical properties of the image and the image apparatus. She uses the medium of film and its materiality to create projected image installations, photographs, and text-based artworks. She often uses recursive strategies to examine and exploit analogue media, making the self-referential elements a productive component of each work.

Bio & Career

Lucy Tevlin received a BA in Fine Art from TU Dublin in 2019, and a MA in Art Research Collaboration (ARC) from IADT in 2021. Selected exhibitions and awards include: SURVEYOR, Solstice Arts Centre (2022); Non-Events Energy Lab, Arcade Studios Belfast (2021); Origins, St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts (2019); and Fire Station Artists’ Studios Digital Media Graduate Award (2019). Tevlin was awarded the Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021.

Publications

Appears in

2021, Critical Bastards Magazine, issue 17
2021, Non-Events Energy Lab, curated by Kate Murphy and designed by Lydia Moran
2021, Cohost, curated by Astrid Newman and designed by Padraig Cunningham

Awards and honours

2022, Agility Award, The Arts Council
2021, Shortlisted for RDS Visual Art Awards
2019, Meath County Council Professional Artists Development Fund
2019, Fire Station Artists’ Studios Digital Media Graduate Award
2019, Image Now: Multimedia Award in Fine Art

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

2023, STREET STREET STREET, The Magnet, Dublin
2023, Common Spaces, 3fe, Harolds Cross, Dublin

Group exhibitions

2022, SURVEYOR, Solstice Arts Centre
2021, Members Show, Platform Arts, Belfast
2021, Non-Events Energy Lab, curated by Kate Murphy, Arcade Studios, Belfast
2021, Cohost, Online Exhibition, curated by Astrid Newman in collaboration with The Lab Gallery, Dublin ¹
2019, Origins, St Carthage Hall, curated by Paul McAree, Lismore Castle Arts ²
2019, TU Dublin Graduate Exhibition
2018, Sympoetic, Farmleigh Cowshed Gallery, Dublin

Projects

The Structure of a Second (2020)
The Structure of a second postcard series were born out of a system of purchasing 8mm home movie footage from Ebay. Before the film arrived, I would write a short text in anticipation of what the footage would be. This text was numbered 1-24, referencing the frame rate of the film. I then decided to never open the packages and instead photograph them unopened. These images were presented alongside the texts in the form of postcards that were redistributed via the postal system.
Reportage (2019)
This smaller scale work simply consists of diagram slide followed by colour slide. The diagrams reference their form, showing diagrams of the internal structure of cameras, projectors and the chemical structure of black and white negatives and colour transparency film.The colours used reference the various colours used throughout the history of the development of the colour print.All the works and the structures that the projectors sit on all work to expose artifice, recognising their own form and content, whereas this screen in being an illusionary device, counteracts this while also emphasising it. The positioning of the screen also acts as a way to draw the viewer into the centre of the room.This work also plays with the slide projectors use as an educational medium, re-performing a previous function.
Narrative Structures (2019)This slide projection work examines what a narrative is, while also at some points performing as a narrative. Parts of this text derive from texts on narratology, namely Gerald Price and Mieke Bal. The use of street photography as a medium of the 20th century counterbalances the medium of slide projection in the work’s dialogue with obsolescence.
It also exists in as a text/image sequence that overlaps and interrelates, something that we automatically do as viewers – correlate text and image, read them together. At times the sequencing plays with that, the relationship between the text and image is non decipherable while in others it is explicit.
Alternate Means of Experiencing Images (2019)

Dual slide projection
The text slides in this work are based off Tom Gunning’s text The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.
Gunning references Hale’s Tours of the World which were an attraction at amusement parks and similar venues in the early 20th Century. They were specially constructed spaces designed to simulate a railway journey. The accompanying images pay homage to this, as well as other moments in early filmmaking.
To quote Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions is “a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.” Essentially instead of the viewer focusing on the narrative, the films from cinema of attractions encourage the audiences to remain aware of the act of looking, the impulse and excitement from the image.