Lucy McRae = Man-Thing

Lucy McRae – and the collaboration duo LucyandBart – are so cool. How is it that something that looks so simple as modifying the body with playful mediums such as paper, grass, soap bubbles, safety pins, toothpicks etc. manages to capture the imagination so? The low tech element of the transformations (the fact that it is not CGI, Photoshop) certainly plays a role – however, the photographs come off as part fashion photography, part performance – they are very slick, studied and accomplished / resolved – they leave no trace of the accident though they may be experimental. What is more, the photographs enact fantasies of body transformation – the grotesque, the man-machine, man-animal, man-thing etc. and in this way perform physical anxieties and desires that we have around the body. It is another way (other than clothing, perhaps more akin to makeup / hair) in which what we wear on the body transforms the architecture of the body and how it is perceived.