Lucy Skuce

Lucy Skuce was born in 1981 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and grew up in Worcestershire. She lives in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Lucy is an artist and filmmaker who was born with profound and multiple disabilities. She bought her first VHS camcorder as a young woman and started to film her life, including the objects and places she identifies as important. Her work in film has been screened both within the UK and internationally, including at Liberty Festival (National Film Theatre BFI (Southbank), and Abilities Festival (Toronto).

Since working as part of the Shadowlight group, her interests have expanded to working in media other than film, and in recent years Lucy has increasingly embraced sculpture and installation. Lucy’s project for LUMINOUS returned to a recurrent theme in her work, the now-demolished Didcot power station, which dominated the landscape of her home town for decades. Blue Didcot A Power Station is her most ambitious project to date, incorporating a
model railway, CCTV and sound systems alongside a scale recreation of the iconic cooling towers, rendered in a uniform blue colour. The piece had to be completed during lockdown, which necessitated some modifications.

New working methods were devised allowing Lucy to remotely oversee the fabrication of the installation in close-up via Skype. Lucy said of working on her project in lockdown:

“It’s been fantastic. [Working on Skype] has been cool– it’s good. I made my 50Hz hum soundtrack at home.

Last year I went out in the car– before the lockdown. I went to visit the cooling towers and saw them come down. The cooling towers are gone now. I visited
the turbine hall before it was shut down as well. It was noisy. I had to wear ear defenders.”