Shannon Cartier Lucy

Shannon Cartier Lucy describes her oil paintings as portraying ‘situations’; a fishbowl on a flaming stove, a woman playing basketball in bed, a Dalmatian mid-autopsy. Despite their setting within the familiar familial home, compositions complete with soft furnishings and characters adorned in crumpled nightdresses, Cartier Lucy’s paintings are nightmarish and uncanny. Growing up with a schizophrenic parent, Cartier Lucy relates that it was not uncommon to find a ‘toaster in the freezer or The Holy Bible in the dishwasher’. Through their absurdist, darkly humorous scenography, the works symbolise domestic disorder and discontent. Like in a bad dream, faces are often obscured, and figures rendered anonymous, and so the viewer projects characters from their own imagination into the empty space. The scenes are always captured at the precipice, perhaps in seconds before the dreamer awakens with a start.