Lucy Clout
A video-maker-come-jewellery designer whose tired-inspired rings are not to be slept on.
There’s a moment in Lucy Clout’s ZZZ (2022) when the voiceover stumbles – her speech fails to form complete thoughts, syntax trails off mid-sentence. It’s a kind of intellectual muttering, performed in the privacy of insomnia. This is not the confident clarity of daytime thought but something else entirely: tired, unsure, a little abject.
The video element of ZZZ unfolds in a sequence of tightly framed shots: an LED lightbox in a darkened room, its surface bearing the weight of a misshapen ceramic form – part slab, part plate, ambiguously functional. At intervals, a viscous, blue liquid – one that moves like shampoo or laundry detergent – is poured into its shallow cavity. Sometimes it fills and sometimes it spills across the illuminated surface, coating it with a gloopy sheen. The cinema screen-esque lightbox, its clinical flatness, is interrupted by the ceramic’s weight and the slow sloosh of the liquid. There’s a deliberate confrontation of materials: the matte grain of hand-formed clay, the slick gleam of the screen, the pearlescent ooze of artificial blue. Across several takes, Clout’s hand enters the frame to switch the light on or off. Her fingers are adorned with chunky silver rings etched with the letters ‘zzz’ and ‘xxx’ – echoes of the verbal stutters heard in the work’s narration. The voiceover – Clout’s own – is mumbled and drowsy, slipping between thoughts like someone half-asleep, recounting fragmented notes, night-thoughts. The spoken language mirrors the visual one: both flicker between coherence and fatigue, presence and withdrawal.
Amid these fragments, jewellery appears – small, intimate markers that catch in the light. As objects that sit against the skin, Clout’s jewellery works feel like tactile pauses, a sort of anchoring abstraction through the senses. ‘Meaningless’ - two little hands hold out a plaque showing letters arranged in a meaningless order. ‘Chewing Gum Ring’ and ‘Good Sleeps Ring’ – both lumpy silver forms inscribed with rough letters. ‘A talisman for good sleep’ reads their item description. Clout seems to turn her attention to the strange choreography of tiredness – the kind that seeps in after hours, when the laptop glow becomes your only source of light.
Below is a conversation between Lucy and I – I asked her questions, and she asked me a few, too.
K.L. Are you interested in sleep?
L.C. I am. Or, I'm interested in sleep as like an altered state. It's a type of consciousness and a different kind of view, being out of sync. A lot of the things I'm interested in are speech or out of sync image and text. And there's a lot of out of ness in sleep. But I'm a really good sleeper.
K.L. Haha. I noticed that your rings bear fragments of language – ‘ZZZ’ or ‘XXX’ – meaningless letter combinations. What draws you to using these words or letters as material?
L.C. I do use meaningless sets of letters, which I guess in some ways is a joke about – sort of – what does it mean to have an object that declares that it's meaningless in some way? I think within a lot of my video work, I'm interested in like how language is used, or how non-smooth language is used. How language isn't just a tool of argument. It's an expression, of connection or background or it's just a thing that people do.
I like to point to language, but without forming sentences or arguments. It’s a feeling. And I think a lot of my work is not sentences, not arguments. It's like, ah, this is a bit sleepy.
K.L. Interesting. Writing is something that kind of is usually quite clear, so I like the fact that your writing reflects your videos in that ambiguous sort of sense.
When you're making videos… Is ambiguity an important part of them? Is there something that you want to say by not saying anything directly or, not?
L.C. I think that one of the reasons for me to be an artist is that it’s a place where ambiguity can exist. Nothing has to be economically or narratively constructive Yeah. In the way that an awful lot of things in the world have to be. What I like most in other people's work is that I get to spend some time in and kind of work it out with them.
One of the best things about video is that it comes out as a linear object, but it's so unlinear when you're making it. It's like a strange sculpture. There has to be places in the world for non-linearity, for things that are a bit odd and don't fit. That is what art can offer.
K.L. Do you have a similar interest in jewellery as a medium? It’s obviously very different to film…
L.C. I do. I like using jewellery in my films, too… sort of dispersing an idea within the object. I also think about my rings as things that will leave an imprint on a body in some way. I'm making a film where I'm going to have some earrings, with crosses on. I was thinking about them in relationship to an internal scan… in the hospital they measure things by putting these crosses that are like points across the body measure internal parts. To understand their normalness or how they're growing or whatever. I think these points hovering around a body is really interesting.
K.L. Do you consider jewellery a sculptural practice or a way of writing or a way of performing? Or none of those things?
L.C. That's a nice question. Um, I do, I consider it, I consider it a sculptural practice. That's my, I guess, part in it. But the element of it that's a performance which is out of my hands is interesting to me.
It’s hard to take jewellery seriously as a sculptural object. There’s something dismissible about it. I’m in the process of making a retrospective jewellery book, but one of the reasons I haven't done it yet is because I need to figure out how to say: yeah, these are sculptures and people wear them. For them to be taken seriously enough.
K.L. I guess you could start by showing or displaying all of the rings somewhere seperate, and then have people pull them out and put them on.
L.C. You’ve got to the heart of it, it's like, ah, is it more serious when its off the body? What does that mean? If something touching a body becomes less.