Lucienne Rickard | Animal

3 September – 4 October 2025

Animal asks us, humans, to step down from the podium and take our place in the crowd– crud. Not as spectators, but as life forms, animals, on a level with the species we share a planet with: Strong, vulnerable, beautiful yet still capable of being knocked on our arse.

Violence can sweep you away, pick you up and entrance you. Lucienne Rickard explains its ‘poetry as developed’, we have imbibed its language and been taught to view it as victory. Animal challenges this. ‘Hopefully I've woken up a little bit and shaken off that propaganda about how beautiful western masculinity is’, she muses. Yet, beauty is hard to escape in Rickard’s work. As a boxer build’s their body, with dedication and precision her drawings are tight, perfectly controlled and meticulous. But then she takes the beauty of a fighter and fractures them in both meaning and form.

Rickard’s figures are down and isolated, between the heavy intimacy of a punch and not yet swaddled by their coach and team. Her bold erasure marks recall the lights of the boxing ring, or, for that matter a punch to the head at once disorientating and splintering. What is next for them? How will they survive?

Rickard’s boxers share the page with other ‘life forms’. In ‘Float (Boxers and Southern Right Whales)’ the bold cetaceans appear to swim out of the top of the page, sized to match the smudged and dissolute fighters beneath. While Rickards’s whales are almost untouched her distorting eraser threatens to obscure the sharks in ‘Vertabrata (Boxers and Grey Nurse Sharks)’. A species itself nearly hunted to extinction in the 20th century.

Rickard has a history of delving into the existential and ecological. In Extinction Studies she painstakingly drew large public works of extinct and endangered species, only to erase them. The message was clear. A question is asked of her audience in Animal, but it is less explicit. Rickard, whose previous work has lingered on the matador, denies the viewer the aggression and certainly of a bull. In ‘Mammal (Boxers and Belted Galloways)’ she places her tumbling champion below the calm, bovine gaze of a mother and calf. While the boxers are taken from remote, photographic portraits distant in time and space from the artist, the life forms they are paired with are immediate. Belted Galloways graze near her house in Lutruwita/ Tasmania, from where, on quiet nights she can hear the song of migrating whales. A sound returning after the near annihilation of the species to hunting.

Whether it's a snakeskin on a bush track, a sand scoured whale vertebra or a hoody once worn by a loved one, we life forms leave our traces. Rickard’s clothing prints speak to an animal that has moved on, whether from life or, as in the case of a snake who's shed its skin, from the moment. Her unique printing method, soaking clothes in charcoal before pressing them to paper, creates a heavy, detailed and almost ominous effect. And yet, there is tenderness in the intimacy, and normalcy of the clothes. Reminding us again, of the warm life form that once stayed snug within. As with her drawings of boxers and other life forms, Rickard’s clothing prints are hyper local, tangible and intimate while still distant in time and geography.

- Zoe Kean