Victoria Lucas

Robert Smithson used the term ‘reclaim’ to contextualise his site / nonsite series, in which he took elements from post-industrial landscapes and arranged them in a gallery context (Hobbs, 1981). Smithson described the term site as ‘the physical, raw reality - the earth or the ground that we are really not aware of when we are in an interior room’ (Smithson, 1969). The site is the encounter and experience of a chaos that is limitless and outside of the artist’s control. It is a place that offers possibilities for discovery without borders… it is the wild reality that mirrors the slippery substance of thought. The nonsite creates an anchor to site, creating an opening in one’s awareness to what exists beyond the gallery or studio. W.J.T Mitchell asks us to think of landscape as ‘a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’ (Mitchell, 1994). Using visual and linguistic language associated with the excavation of land, Victoria's research refers to the materiality of Robert Smithson’s work to test out ways of revisioning the substance of female identity, sited in the landscapes she aims to dig out and reclaim.

In this research enquiry the material substance of the landscape is viewed as a transformative cultural material, which is activated through the nonsite of her artworks. Excavating sites to reveal the sedimentary layers of matter is a methodology that plays with the complexities of representing the female subject, initiated through the direct encounters she has with the land. Agency becomes important when thinking about subjectivity in this context, as Victoria develops female agents - avatars - to occupy these nonsites as a form of critique and as a process of reclamation. This multifaceted process creates an analogical opening that enables other layers of investigation to take place within her practice, so that the language and labour of reclamation as a physical land-based process has symbolic purchase in the feminist context the research occupies. Historical and fictional material is excavated and reclaimed from archival documents and fictional literature. Parallels are drawn here between the reclamation of existing cultural material and the reclamation of land, using the deconstructed aspects of patriarchal matter as landfill. In this multi-varied approach, reclamation becomes a process of revisioning, as the locus of agency and power are reconstituted. Michel Foucault writes that ‘in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to disassociate these relations’. Creating an artwork as a nonsite; as a site of investigative resistance, in the form of an artwork and as a nonsite, seeks to not only understand power relations but to symbolically revision them through an autonomous process of reclamation.