For over a decade, Lucie Noël Thune has created seductive, challenging, and poetic works of art that highlight our relationship to the artificial. Found objects, chemical based petroleum, wax casts, plastic refuse—these have become her media, through which Thune has developed astonishing effects. There is a poetic quality to her work — a seductive attention to detail, and one might even characterize her as a master of the synthetic, and yet this poetry never obscures its own political dimensions. The environmental impacts and uses of synthetic materials are themes that the artist has revisited throughout her career. Here is an artist who asks hard questions, and whose works often manifest themselves as the hard answers to these questions.
Thune’s installation Flora reflects this dynamic. Frosty sculpture, wax and found objects comprise the piece. Together, they form an installation that utilizes everyday materials to reflect upon our lives. In this garden, we discover plastic flowers formed by disposable jewelry strings. We encounter chemical based petroleum flowers. We are met by ephemeral works that awaken our senses—a cold sculpture that accrue frost and evolve like a time piece. There is cast-wax sculptures, addressing the transient nature of things. This is a garden, then, that explores themes of consumerism, waste-streams and environmental impacts, and so its flowers come to form the perennial blooms of disaster. Prophetic and terrifying, their beauties remonstrate with us about a future smothered in plastic. In this way, Flora cultivates invention, fancy and serious investigations. It strives to engage its audience in a dialogue about the issues of mass consumption. These are issues that Thune has also made self-reflective. Her work does not merely challenge its viewers and their own moral obligations to the planet; it also challenges itself by addressing the ethics of artistic production. In an era of environmental crisis and mass pollution, Flora asks itself: should the artists of the Anthropocene use artificial materials?
Lucie Noël Thune is a visual artist based in Norway. She works with the transient nature of objects. She incorporates mediums such as sculpture, drawings and films in her artistic process. She uses everyday materials to investigate and amplify links between social, political and economic systems. Thune has taught and participated in residence programs as a visiting artist in Europe and the United States.
Thune’s installation has also been shown at Oakland Museum of California, Bolinas Museum, Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Kim Foster Gallery in New York City, Château Musée - Musée Renoir France, Galerie Hus, Paris, Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris, The National Museum of Contemporary Art Norway, Henrik Ibsen Museum Norway and Haugar Kunst Museum, Norway. Her work has been reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America and TK-21 La Revue, 14 - Paris among others.
Granting support for this exhibition was provided by the Government of Norway Office of Contemporary Art.