CCA Research Associate Lucie McLaughlin at Life's Not Personal

Lucie McLaughlin is a Belfast born artist and writer. Her work is realised in forms such as moving and still image, sound and writing, where a proximity between language and art reveals a collapse in distance between the ordinary and the imaginative, the creative and the critical. She is completing the MLitt in Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art in August 2022. She has worked recently with Catalyst Arts, Belfast and CCA Derry-Londonderry where she is a current research associate.

Suppose A Collapse arranges moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other, intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Hybrid writing informed by and formed of life, the text collects experiences based on the author’s changing relationship with family and place.

Slipping in and out of lyric essaying, the text addresses the movement between film, art and writing to reflect both lucidity and a fracturing present. Personal and collective histories such
as those of a child born in a mother and baby home in Belfast in the early 20th Century, or a single mother trying to make ends meet, align and misalign around a poetics examining sound, light, swimming and surfaces.

Encounters with art exhibitions in the long corridors of the Reina Sofíá in Madrid, or the sunken gallery of the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast, anchors thinking which is as likely to land on the handle of a door to watch a spider crawl away as it is to discuss work by Céline Sciamma, Tai Shani, Peggy Phelan and Katrina Palmer. How many times can we fold up our lives into smaller and smaller shapes until there’s no room anymore, only the one that we’re in?