Lucy Orta
Part of the MIT Fall 2024 Architecture Lecture Series. Presented with the Art, Culture, and Technology program.
Lucy Orta’s visual arts practice investigates the interrelations between the individual body and community structures, exploring their diverse identities and means of cohabitation and employing socially engaged methodologies. She works across a range of mediums including drawing, textile sculpture, photography, film and performance to realise singular bodies of work. Amongst the most notable are ‘Refuge Wear’ and ‘Body Architecture’, portable and autonomous habitats that reflect on issues of mobility and human survival; ‘Nexus Architecture’, clothing and accessories that shape modular and collective bodies through the metaphor of the social link; and ‘Life Guards’ and ‘Genius Loci’, wearable sculpture that embody human vulnerability and resilience. She collaborates with a wide range of communities, often those on the margins of exclusion such as prison residents, asylum seekers, homeless and care hostel residents, empowering participants through co-creation and inclusive methods of creative practice.
In 2003 she was the youngest female artist to be published in the Phaidon Press contemporary artist collection. In acknowledgement of her innovative socially engaged research practice Lucy Orta was nominated as Head of the Man & Humanity, a pioneering master program for sustainable design, which she cofounded with Li Edelkoort at Design Academy Eindhoven, in 2002. She is a Professor at London College of Fashion since 2002, a member of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, and Chair of Art and the Environment at the University of the Arts London since 2013. In recognition of her esteem and academic contribution to the visual arts, she has received an honorary Master of Arts from Nottingham Trent University and an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Brighton.
Lucy co-founded the Studio Orta with her partner the Argentine artist Jorge Orta, in 1992. They have worked in partnership since 2005 under the co-authorship Lucy + Jorge Orta. In recognition of their contribution to the arts, they are the recipients of numerous awards including the Andy Warhol Foundation Visual Arts Award (2001) and Green Leaf Award for artistic excellence with an environmental message, presented by United Nations Environment Programme in partnership with the Natural World Museum at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway (2007). Their monumental Cloud Meteoros was selected for the inaugural Terrace Wires public art commission for St Pancras International in London (2013).
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