Lucy Stein & Jo Robertson

Collaborators Lucy Stein and Jo Robertson are keen to spread their Blood ‘n’ Feathers philosophy further in Scotland where the idea was initially conceived and nurtured. For the Collective this has manifested itself as a music performance on the opening night and a new series of complementary paintings and collages.

The philosophy is based on enthusiasm and a mutual, unbridled love of painting, drawing and music but also explores the boundaries between such excitement and anxiety, passion and hysteria, agony and ecstasy. Lucy and Jo walk a tightrope between spoilt brat joie de vivre and Nietzschian nihilism and try to negotiate this in a critically aware and reflexive manner.

Their paintings try to convey an understanding of the world through a combined interest in anxiety driven existentialism as realised in painting by the grave and worthy expressionist style most particular to Germany, and the language of pop that equally informs their lives. Rock music obviously combines these strands in similarly ‘authentic’ manner and Jo regularly plays in a band, though their heroine Courtney Love throws this out of kilter with her peculiar brand of contradictory megalomaniac poppiness. But it’s Love’s anarchic humour and absurdity that attracts them coupled with Patti Smith’s notion of "babelogue", as they have their tongues firmly lodged in their cheeks most of the time.

In this gap of wilful misunderstanding and subverted doctrine lies the key to the oceanic feeling, which is what Lucy and Jo aspire to. Taking ‘heroic’ painting from the boys is a valid approach to art making and contemporary feminism.

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Lucy Stein & Jo Robertson