HappenArt

Lucy McRae and Bart Hess
Visual artist
Location: US/Netherland

Lucy McRae.

Artist Lucy McRae leads a multi disciplinary, art-research studio investigating the impact future technologies have on human evolution. In parallel to her gallery and museum-focused art practice she thrives as a director, a maker, in the writer’s room and in the lab.

Human intimacy.

Boldly staring down the status quo, Lucy pioneers a new story for how future technologies will fundamentally alter human intimacy. Reproduction, spirituality, biology and wellness culture. Shining light on the ethical implications of genetic engineering. Her prophetic aesthetic is flung far from archetypal tropes. Creating nostalgia for a future about to happen. Lucy’s work diversifies the predictive voices we traditionally call ‘science’ and ‘technology’. Through designing hypothetical worlds that use speculation as a tool to provoke an exploration of ideologies and ethics about who we are, and where we are headed.

Bart Hess.

The work of Bart Hess is of the most tactile and intuitive nature. He first delved into instinctive textiles when studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where he created A Hunt for High Tech, a collection of materials that mimicked the bestial outer layers of unfamiliar hybrid species, accompanied by an evocative film that brilliantly brought his concepts to life.

Relation to the human body.

Over the past ten years, Hess has developed an impressive roster of work. He has pinned, stretched, slimed and scraped materials in relation to the human body, and collaborated with the likes of Lucy McRae, Nick Knight, Lady Gaga, Iris van Herpen and Walter van Beirendonck. Hess feels that our bodies are increasingly becoming a platform for sensitive and interactive technology. And has constantly exposed the intimate relationship materials have upon our skin. “It felt like a natural instinct for me to start working on the body.

My own skin.

When I create a new design I always place it on my own skin even-though it originally was created as, for example, a flooring material. The fascinating thing about it for me is the combination of a skin and a material. By using a material on the body that is not the body’s own, but making it look like it could possibly be. I create a tension between the body and material.”