Lucy Wright
Lucy Wright is an artist based in Leeds, UK. Her work, which combines painting and socially-engaged practice, sits at the intersection of folk(lore) and place, often using as source material the large personal archive of photographs and research she has gathered over nearly a decade of documenting female and queer-led folk customs. Many of her projects reference and subvert traditional practices to comment on contemporary issues, from migration to climate change, and she has recently begun to explore convergences between the ‘wild woman’ trope and Renaissance images of Mary Magdalene as an ascetic, covered in thick body hair, to reflect on relationships between women, loss and the landscape.
Wright received a Vice Chancellor’s scholarship from Manchester School of Art for her practice PhD (2014) and is a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Hertfordshire. She has undertaken residencies for Analogue Farm (2022), Morning Boat (2018/19) and AIRSPACE (2015) and had solo shows at The Bug (2022), Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery (2021) and Cecil Sharp House (2017). Her work has been shown at Mead Gallery (forthcoming), NNContemporary (2018) and Compton Verney (2017), amongst other places, and recent talks and consultancy include for Creative Folkestone (2022), Art House Worcester (2022), Littleborough Arts Festival (2022) and UNESCO Creative Cities (2021).
In 2018 she published her first book, 21 st Century Folk Art with Social Art Publications and in 2021, she launched the ‘Folk is a Feminist Issue’ manifesta at Lancashire Encounter Festival: folkisfeminist.com/manifesta