Giant brooms, fire pits, chandelier drones and brass mushrooms to start. The world has been turning fast for renowned sculpture artist Lily Cox Richard (LCR).
For over 20 years, LCR has participated in numerous residencies and her work has been the subject of exhibitions across the U.S. Her exhibition Weep Holes, is currently on display at MASS MoCA, a converted mill factory that is now one of the largest contemporary art museums in the U.S. In addition, LCR recently participated in a competitive summer residency at the Kohler Co. Factory, a company well known for manufacturing home appliances, fixtures and furnishing.
LCR is an assistant professor in the Art Foundation Program (AFO) at VCUarts which is designed to provide students with a multidisciplinary foundation in their art education. She earned an MFA with a concentration in sculpture from VCUarts and holds BFA in jewelry/metal arts from California College of the Arts.
Here, LCR discusses her current exhibition at MASS MoCA, her Kohler summer residency and the connection between her art and her teaching at VCUarts.
Can you tell me a little bit about Weep Holes that is currently showing at MASS MoCA?
One of the things I was excited about at MASS MoCA was the opportunity to engage with the architecture there. … As you walk through the gallery space the viewer is kind of tracing various paths that are created with the sculptures themselves.
When you enter the exhibition, there is a curved row of columns that I interweaved with retired fire hoses, which almost creates the feeling of peering over the edge of a giant basket. There are sandbags that have been stacked to create berms with dribble castles on top. So, these stacks of sandbags that seem to be a protective shield have their tops bursting open and the kind of playful sandcastles that you might remember making as or with kids on a carefree beach day are spilling out. Then you pass through a doorway and are confronted with a giant broom made out of backer rod and a floor sculpture that is loosely based on mycelial networks made out of spliced rope.
There are several structures made out of tomato cages woven out of bamboo and kudzu, a 1200lb bale of tinsel, and a drone that’s carrying a chandelier.
… Another anchor of the exhibition are mounds of fire pits in the corners of the larger rooms that are piled up, leaning against the wall. They almost look like they are holding up this middle wall. In the midst of the height of the uprising for Black lives in Richmond, when everything felt like it was really on fire… In Richmond, energetically, it felt like anything could be kindling. Some nights those fires felt really intense and explosive, and some nights, fires in a different context felt incredibly healing and restorative. I was making fire pits and offering them to friends. …I felt connected by this web of fire … as if we were somehow connected by this network of fire pits.
For the exhibition I borrowed those fire pits back. … I feel like they hold … energy of the past … but also different ideas of what could happen next. I was especially excited to have those energies for potential futures accumulate together in one space.
The title Weep Holes, is an architectural reference to water passing through solid structures, like if there’s a brick wall or stone wall, water will need to find its way through. People might incorporate a path for the water to flow through it or the water will just carve a path through that wall. But when people hear the phrase “Weep Holes,” they often think of crying eyeballs or leaky orifices, which I also think are interesting ways for water to escape a body or leak through a passage or find its way out.
[Weep Holes is] kind of strange and magical and uncertain of its time–whether it’s a contemporary moment or it’s slightly in the future or slightly elsewhere.
You mention Weep Holes, being unsure of its time, was that intentional from the beginning or did this uncertainty emerge over time?
I was first invited to make the exhibition in early 2017. It was right after Trump’s inauguration and the invitation was to make an exhibition at MASS MoCA in 2021.
I felt like we were in a really dark place and I didn’t know what-all would be happening in the country in 2021…. All I could imagine was there would be a lot to clean up.
I just kept imagining this giant broom to try to attempt to start sweeping up the mess on the other side. But I was also thinking about brooms’ roles in spells and magic and energy [as well as] shifting the energy of a room by sweeping.
But of course so many things have happened since then and the exhibition itself was rescheduled so many times because of the pandemic. My studio practice evolved so much living in Richmond during the uprising of Black lives and [peak] pandemic time. … My studio was transformed into a hub of mutual aid for a chunk of time … it just really shifted what felt important to me in what I was making.
Considering how this project has evolved around the years, if you were a person walking into the exhibition with fresh eyes, what messages/themes do you think would translate?
A couple of people that I’ve talked to … they were surprised by how much humor they saw in the exhibition or the kind of lightness or play. I guess maybe play is a better word than humor. I think that’s interesting because I was like ‘why did you think it was going to be so dark? I thought that it was all about magic.’
[The exhibition] comes out from things that have the potential to be really dark, but I think it is all about possibilities.
[For example] there is a drone that’s carrying a chandelier that’s throwing rainbows all over the room and lots of sparkly tinsel bits, so I think there is a kind of lightness in with the heaviness.
What is another project you’ve recently worked on?
As soon as the Spring 2022 semester ended I drove to Wisconsin to participate in this artist in residency program at the Kohler Factory…. They have an amazing artist in residency program called Arts/Industry where they have artists that either work in the foundry where they make cast iron tubs and faucets or in the pottery where they make a lot of toilets and urinals. I was in the foundry side, so I was casting there all summer. I got back the day before (VCUarts) classes started.
For the drone chandelier that is part of the exhibition at MASS MoCA… This summer I was making [a version] that is an actual working chandelier. I was taking apart drones and casting elements of them in brass… I will be wiring those together to create a working chandelier hung with crystals.
I also forged a lot of mushrooms and cast them in brass. I was [also] making some sculptures out of baskets and then casting those also in both cast iron and brass.
How do your professional experiences relate to your teaching at VCUarts?
Right now I teach both art foundation and sculpture. In the art foundation, I teach in space.
[Typically] foundation programs have 2D, 3D and 4D classes. What I think is really different and exciting and interesting about VCUarts’ foundation program is that they teach surface, space, time and drawing. Space, I think, is much broader and encompassing than just 3D studies.
We think about, not just objects in space and how things get made, but also how bodies react to the built environment. Or how objects relate to landscape or cultural and social landscapes and systems and networks and how scale works.
And those things are all very much important in my work…I think a lot about issues of scale and moving through space.
My work isn’t necessarily comfortably positioned in just one disciple, [for example] my work often has conversations with mycology and with social justice and sustainability studies.
Within the School of the Arts, the art foundation program is one of the most interdisciplinary programs. … The program has to speak the language of students going into all of these different departments and hopefully interface with the rest of the school too.
Lead Image: Lily Cox-Richard. Photo: Kohler Co: Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center