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Fertile Objects: 'Penetralia', Sarah Lucas and English Modernism

The paper was written in response to an invitation from the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) Leeds to participate in a programme of academic lectures during its exhibition Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things in 2012. The exhibition has been recognised as significant because the first to break with discussion of Lucas as a central player in British art in the 1990s and to focus on the sculptural rather than the sensational. ‘Fertile Objects’ is the first academic exploration of the idea that British Modernism, as articulated in the 1934 exhibition and catalogue Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, was the guiding spirit of the body of work Lucas exhibited under the heading Penetralia at Sadie Coles HQ in 2008, and to consider what this might tell us about Lucas’s position as a sculptor working in Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The lecture explored both Lucas’s contemporary re-articulation of Henry Moore’s dictum of ‘truth to material’, and Penetralia’s debt to English Surrealism as defined by Paul Nash in his 1937 article ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’, and his photographs published in 1951 as the book Fertile Image. It concludes that Penetralia is Lucas’s most consciously art historical project; that in 2008 in an English artworld dominated by Damian Hirst’s literalism and practice of art as the product of light industry, together with the general digital turn in art-making, Penetralia establishes a dialogue with 1930s anxieties about the effects of artificial materials and industrial fabrication methods on the human imagination, expressed most notably by Adrian Stokes. The lecture is now published as an edited paper on the HMI Research website in ‘Henry Moore Online Papers and Proceedings’, a series developed to support the Institute’s world-recognised reputation as a centre of excellence for sculpture research.