LUCY SKAER is preparing for her biggest solo show in Scotland to date. In her Glasgow studio, an antique mahogany table that she bought on eBay and has coated in black ink takes over the centre of the room. The Beck's Futures-nominated artist, who has been championed by Charles Saatchi and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale last year, was here last night taking a print of the table top, mapping its textured, scratched surface in ink until way after dark.
Upstairs, a giant scroll of paper is laid across the floor. On it, Skaer has drawn a warship in her obsessively detailed and decorative style, combining thousands of contiguous squares like tesserae in a mosaic, each one containing a spiral. A companion drawing of a whale, and another of a line of horses and their riders, will be shown with the ship at her upcoming Fruitmarket gallery show, the connection between them being "cinematic, like scenes edited together in a film". Even though she screenprinted the spirals instead of drawing them by hand as she has done in the past, the warship alone has taken her four months. The result is stunning, very thorough and beautiful too in its exacting form. "If I could get the same visual effect in less time I would," she confesses. "Sometimes it can feel a bit like, which part of this is supposed to be fun? It is brilliant to make these drawings but there is something imprisoning in the method."
Skaer looks settled in her studio – folding bike propped against a whitewashed wall, pair of socks thrown in a corner, plastic sandwich packet full of pencil sharpenings – but she has only been here three weeks and is moving on in a matter of days, though to where she has no clue as yet. "I've never had a permanent studio in Glasgow," she says. "I'm going to London for a while to work with Rosie (2003 Beck's Futures winner artist Rosalind Nashashibi] for Art Now at the Tate, which we're doing together this year. Then I'll come back up and see what happens."
She says this nomadic way of working is both exhilarating and frustrating, having recently returned from a year-long residency in Basel. Originally from Cambridge, Skaer graduated from Glasgow School of Art's environmental art course in 1997 and ended up staying because "there is a really interesting combination of good artists making work here".
She has smuggled moth pupae into the Old Bailey's criminal courts, made 3D Rorschach ink blots, and filmed New York's Metropolitan Museum collection at night, though she is probably best known for her abstract, diagrammatic drawings based on found images. Her meticulous drawings of prison cells, where different colours are used to represent light and dark areas, or a life-size reproduction of Hokusai's Great Wave, are particularly astonishing. This is not simply because so much work goes into making them: it is their scale and composition that gives them power. Her prison cells, for example, are not just drawings of enclosed spaces, but representations of our fear of being trapped.
A show on this scale in Scotland seems long overdue for Skaer (she has just finished up a solo exhibition in London's Chisenhale Gallery). If there was such a thing as Young Scottish Artists – to London's YBAs – she would be one of them, no doubt in the company of many of her contemporaries also represented by Susanna Beaumont's doggerfisher gallery in Edinburgh.
Skaer recently made a curtain for an exhibition in Berlin with Timorous Beasties and Nashashibi, her long-term collaborator who used to work in a studio next to her in Glasgow. Later on today, she will cycle over to Kenny Hunter's studio to work with his assistant on a major new commission for the Fruitmarket show, a series of sculptures inspired by the medieval allegory of the Danse Macabre, the recurring image of the dancing skeleton leading the living to the grave. "I see these images as a very early flourishing of conceptual art," says Skaer. "There are so many different levels of removal in them."
The new installation, a trio of lifesize sculptures based on woodcuts that Skaer saw in a Basel museum, sounds fascinating. "They are quite hefty; the smallest weighs 200 kilos," she explains, passing me a heavy, strengthened plaster 'arm'.
The work continues Skaer's preoccupation not so much with death, but with representations of it. It is not the cadaver or the skeleton that interests this intense, intellectually rigorous artist, who I'm not surprised to hear comes from a family of scientists. No, it's the fact that the corpse is a perfect form of abstraction: it represents life, or the passing of it, but in itself contains nothing.
Like Christine Borland, the Glasgow-based artist whose interest in forensic science led her to purchase a human skeleton by mail order, Skaer is understandably touchy about people assuming she might be a tad morbid. "I have to be careful about this," she says. "I'm interested in how the body is not the living person. I don't have a macabre fascination with death." She pauses to consider her protest, then admits: "I'm not sure I can completely get away with saying that."
The whale, too, has appeared in her work before, and formed part of her Venice Biennale show. Skaer always begins with an existing image or representation, and her search for a whale was "a perfect scenario", she explains. "In Basel I got invited to go on a tour of the Natural History Museum store a few days before I was leaving. I saw this whale in storage that just happened to be exactly the same length as the balcony in Fruitmarket where I wanted to show it. I phoned up the next morning and went and measured it.
"I was first looking for a whale skeleton when I was in New York. They didn't have one in the Natural History Museum, and I spent ages looking through books. Then, unexpectedly, I had to go back to Cambridge, and there was my whale! My mum worked as a zoologist in the museum there, and I had seen the whale every day as a child and forgotten that it was the one I originally had in mind."
It was back in Cambridge that Skaer first became interested in art, thanks to a particularly memorable art teacher. "He grew loads of cannabis plants in the classroom," she says "and we would do these still life drawings of them, totally innocent with no idea what they were. But he made art seem like a very cool thing to do." She starts laughing, realising how this could look, and returns to her more guarded self: "I'm not saying drugs got me into art."
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Lucy Skaer, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Saturday until July 9 •
www.fruitmarket.co.ukThe full article contains 1172 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
