Lucy Skaer

The image of a dead man, taken from a newspaper report of a riot in Mexico, lies across the top of a large, banner-like sheet of unstretched paper. A red pool of blood runs from his head, through the pattern of a Chinese bowl, to a flipped image of the same figure beneath resting on a strange grouping of modular building blocks. To Skaer, the corpse represents "a naturally occurring image, the perfect likeness of the living person, and yet fundamentally different." Like the bowl, an object spanning generations of mortality, it is removed from its historical and geographical context to allow the artist to construct a new narrative on a new timescale. Tragedy No Us Touched Has relates closely to Diagrams and Banners (Blood). It employs a similar playing card construction, pairing semi-symmetrical images of a human form lifted from photojournalistic imagery, this time a girl injured in the Bloody Sunday protests, with a delicately etched glass bowl. The bowl is drawn in pencil three times, each version layered close atop the other, to attain a blurry, optical appearance. Entwined in a sort of Venn diagram or a heraldic coat of arms, figure and object are associated by colour (the blood on the girl's face is Wedgewood blue) and design (the pattern on her clothes, the markings on its surface).