Interventions from the archive of Carole Luby
Exhibition
Thursday 16th - Saturday 25th February 2023
Artist Carole Luby was a frequent collaborator with Sally Madge. Together they created a rich body of work which features in Sally’s retrospective. In their shared spirit of subversiveness and play, we are creating a series of interventions from Carole’s archive across High Bridge Works and NCA.
Excerpt from performance In the Dark (2013)
Carole: I guess our relationship has had its ups and downs… but we have always come back for more haven’t we…because something between us gets worked through.
Sally: There must be something there at the core that we feel precious enough to hold onto…
Carole: Yes. What I really like about you is your wild child play.
Sally: Yes, I enjoy that with you. There aren’t many people around who can actually play.
Event
Saturday 25th February, 1 - 5pm (drop in)
Carole Luby invited Dawn Felicia Knox to make a series of photographs during her last years as she moved towards her death. Dawn also documented her last performances and the community she drew in around her. The images, together with Carole’s drawings, make a powerful document of a life and a death fully lived.
Join Dawn as she sifts through the photographs, drawings and archival material working to make a book of their collaboration. This is a drop in event. All are welcome with a note that there will be images of nudity.
About Carole Luby (1943 – 2015)
Carole Luby was an inspiring artist whose life became an artwork. She was drawn to the domestic and the transgressive, the playful and the solemn, the abject and the divine. Carole used her body and her home as sites for unflinching investigation, finding the universal within the personal, the domestic, the intimate.
She established the project 25 Stratford Grove in her home, inviting artists to create, perform, enact and engage. Along with curator Hannah Marsden, the work she facilitated and supported had a profound effect on both those who create work there and those who experienced the environment she created. She was driven to create a community that became a platform to ask vital questions in ways that were authentic, challenging, and unexpected.
Throughout all her movements through different media, she always returned to the sketchbook. Drawing, often blind, the lines of her body hundreds of times over. One year before her death, Carole invited all to look at the drawings she had made since her cancer diagnosis, inviting each person to choose which images and sketchbooks they were most drawn to and then place them in the fire, burning them to ash. She continued to draw near daily until her death in 2015.