Meet our Guest with Lucy McRae

Portrait of Lucy McRae. Photographed by Ira Chernova.

For this story of Meet our Guest, Alana Kushnir interviewed Lucy McRae, an artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect. McRae's work explores the cultural and emotional impacts science and cutting edge technology have on redesigning the body. She works across installation, film, photography, AI, genetic engineering and edible technology. 

McRae has exhibited at museums, film festivals, institutes such as MIT, Ars Electronica and NASA and science forums across the world. Selected major artworks have been exhibited at Science Museum London, Centre Pompidou and the Venice Architecture Biennale. She is a visiting professor at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles; and is recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. 


I first came across your work in 2013, when I saw a fashion film you collaborated on with the Australian designers, This is Chorus. In the film, we see the inner workings of a lab producing your ‘Swallowable Parfum’, a concept where the perfume is in a pill-like form, made to be digested and then emitted by the body. Can you tell me more about this work?

I had never made a Fashion Film before. I had never worked with a fashion designer on a collection before. And, I had never put on a live performance before. So, I think that the ‘never done before’ is something that continually drives my work. The Swallowable Parfum Live Lab was that. It was part of a residency at Pin Up Gallery in Melbourne, shepherded by Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook. There was never a plan to make a film or to even put on a performance. But, because of this collaboration with Chorus (Cassandra Wheat and Louise Pannell) and Melbourne’s best Amy Silver, it took on all these different layers and dimensions.

There was a collection that was created by Cassandra and Louise. We built sets, we created packaging for the Swallowable Parfum that didn't exist before. The Swallowable Perfum went from an artistic provocation to a speculative product in a period of three months. There was a choreographic element and a live performance. It was also an experiment in how you can use film in a live way. We shot the film and then we acted it out in front of a live audience. Unexpectedly, about 300 people turned up!

What's also interesting is that now, I am moving into my own interpretation of fashion, or what I am calling ‘uniforms’. I'm making a small editioned capsule of art uniforms, purchasable through Instagram, presented by dancers and documented on film.


Can you tell me more about your working methodology, your process of collaboration?

My work relies a lot on alchemy, on everybody involved taking risks with a view to innovating and making something new that hasn't been made before. That relies a lot on trusting your collaborators. These days I’m trying to maintain the magic and alchemy of transformation while keeping the process relatively stress-free for all stakeholders involved. No matter who is involved - be it a client, a commissioner, an institute, a fabricator - everybody agrees that we don't know what it's going to be until the end, and that relies heavily on trust, intuition and a shared will to pioneer.

You describe yourself as a ‘body architect’, what do you mean by this?

In very basic terms, it's a way of describing an outsider. Someone that crosses many disciplines. Body architecture can touch upon film, art, photography, wearable technology, artificial intelligence and edible technology.

In 2006, when I was going for a job at Philips (the consumer electronics company) in Eindhoven, it wasn’t acceptable to describe myself as ‘I’m a hybrid’. They needed to categorise and give me a label. So, ‘body architect’ was a fabricated term we made up (Clive van Heerden and myself) to win a job that required a hybrid skill set, even though HR was not familiar with that term yet. I led their Far Future Design research lab that focused on emotional sensing. Fast forward 15 years to now, and I would argue that the only way to move forward is to be a hybrid.


You were born in London, grew up in Melbourne, and spent your early working life in Eindhoven, Amsterdam, then London and Melbourne again. Now you’ve settled in Los Angeles. What does LA offer you?

 I function when there is an element of anonymity and alienation and this place is vast. It embraces many different paths – tech, entertainment, science, architecture, art, design, health tech... I felt immediately at home here. The other reason was two work opportunities. I am a visiting Professor at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), teaching a Vertical Studio and Seminar. I also won a few big projects located in LA. I was Adidas’ Creative Director for the Future of Sport for 2019 I won a big project that required the making of a machine that I had never made before, but had made a prototype with a fabricator in LA when I previously worked here in 2014. Again, it was kind of serendipitous that those projects required a certain amount of risk taking, and that I had an affinity with the people I was working together with here. This decision was bolstered by creative producer Alice Parker, and together we set up the LA studio.

Heavy Duty Love, 2021. Photographed by Brian Overend.

You have a work currently on view in the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial, called Heavy Duty Love. How did this project come about?

The Venice Biennial is one of the biggest stages for an artist or architect to be part of. I do these five to ten-year timelines where I write down what I want to achieve with no limitations. The Venice Biennial has been on my map since 2012, as in ‘I’m joking but let's put it down.’ When the email came (offering to participate) I was like, ‘I've made it, this is it!’ Then COVID stepped in and the project got delayed. What I was proposing had to be changed three times (originally I had proposed an architecturally scaled hug, but due to social distancing, we scaled down and made it sculptural, rather than interactive.

Like everybody, my pipeline changed (because of the implications of COVID). I bought an industrial sewing machine and sewed the entire thing myself. I've discovered that I'm a fourth-generation sewer. The certainty of taking two materials and sewing them together is comforting. Everything I take on is so visceral and uncertain, and sewing starkly contrasted with the not knowing. The sewing allowed me to make and prototype to a more concentrated and complete outcome. I likely over-delivered on prototypes, but because of that, I developed many more ideas and compositions, including the small art-uniform collectables.

Heavy Duty Love is a speculative sculpture, rather than an interactive machine. In a world where CRISPR technology (genetic engineering) is a consumer product and generations of kids are grown in a laboratory, a mother is no longer the vehicle for pregnancy, it's a lab dish in a lab, where you can have multiple parents’ DNA. Touch is the first sense that develops in the womb, and when you tinker with human biology there is absolutely no way for us to fathom what this will change. This speculative sculpture is for those generations who have been born in a lab and develop hypersensitivities and neurobiological quirks that we haven't experienced nor interfaced with before.

The idea is that we are the ancestors and we’re looking at the future of intimacy, touch and human connection. It is making parallels between neurobiological quirks that we know like autism, Asperger's, dyslexia, that some people see as weaknesses and would likely be cut out of human biology if a certain type of scientist is choosing what is ‘perfect’. It's really about celebrating these sensitivities as a strength as opposed to see them as fragile.

I want platforms like the Venice Biennial to be opportunities to ask the questions that science and tech aren’t asking. For it to be cracked open and shared with a wider audience, rather than under the hood of the privileged.


Have your creations been applied by the science or technology industries?

So many things come to mind. I remember doing a talk at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. A nerve-wracking leap, to be presenting as an artist in front of a very academic and genius audience. But, being out of depth, is where the magic happens and like being an outsider, welcoming the tough questions that were posed. I think this kind of vision, of bringing art into serious science and tech, expands the opportunity for discovery and what could lie beyond. When you bring together minds from very different backgrounds and expertise, you inspire, mix, mutate and defend your own processes and ways of working, how would an artist approach a scientific hypothesis, and vice versa?

 What I'm learning is that the concepts that I have are so far-reaching that there is a technological lag. Maybe even a cultural lag. I don't want to rope my ideas back in. My job is to interpret the fringes of culture and present it in familiar ways, and perhaps by making provocations like Swallowable Perfume, will help leap us toward discovering technologies greater than this.


To wrap up, you mentioned you like making five- and ten-year plans. Can you give us some insight into your five-year plan?

I’m curious about finding ways of bringing science to street level, to talk about the complex stuff, like CRISPR, in easier more tactile ways. We read about it. We watch it. Can we wear science? Fashion is a superhighway. So, I’ve developed CRISPR merchandise, for want of a better word, an experiment I'm doing solo and I’m curious whether it could impact understanding of this technology and the unspoken ethics that are attached to editing the genome. I’m also moving into performance and choreography as a way of filmmaking, which is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. Merging that with set design to create films that are oriented towards dance. I’m interested in water as an art concept and how that could be in the gallery or future wellness space.

I think the role of the artist is being able to continually reinvent oneself, which takes a lot of risks, reflection and changing course. That’s also part of my plans. 


Lucy McRae’s piece Heavy Duty Love is on view at the Venice Architecture Biennial until 27th November 2021. Check out Lucy’s Instagram @lucymcrae for pre-orders of her science, art uniforms.

You can also find her work online at www.lucymcrae.net and explore a virtual tour of her survey show at the NGV in 3D here.