Bio
Despite being born in New Haven, Lucy Eickelberg has spent most of her upbringing in rural Germany. Growing up in a town of 800, Lucy enjoyed a relationship with the outdoors. She still has had a deep interest in the natural world, earth and its creations, that still influences her practice. Drawing from the history of germany, medieval symbolism and references often appear in her work.
Artist Statement
My work is guided by the patterns I see in human comfort through the lens of time. Across my work I reference folklore, mythology and oratorical legends. Growing up in rural Germany, I was surrounded by palpable historical traces: with gravestones in my garden, my childhood home a cultural landmark, and castle-seats from the 11th century in my periphery. Leaving Germany to study abroad elicited a yearning for more presence of history in my contemporary experience. I started exploring the connections between the self, shaped by repetitive traditions, and how identity is rooted in the various landscapes of upbringing: in physical and imaginary surroundings.
In the recent two years, the existence of the Grimm fairytales has served as fertile soil for my work. Despite being one of the most well-known collected body of stories, they exhibit numerous changes and redactions– following societal responses. I reinterpret those occurrences through printmaking processes. As the telling of stories get altered through generations of storytelling, so does my process of etching, echoing the historic source material that inspires my work. Processes of repetition and iteration are used to reinterpret motifs, putting them in new, strange, and imaginary contexts. Symbols become ‘flattened in time,’ stripped of relations and belonging. Each symbol is awarded a continuous individual meaning, collectively creating an overarching visual language that reframes my own understanding of personal history and heimat.
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Ultimately, I consider the historic phenomena and superstitions as stand-ins for contemporary psychological and social conditions, dealing with similar worries experienced in contemporary society. Certain cornerstone experiences are shared among human beings across time, which become deconstructed and re-assembled in my work. Comfort can be found in the dealing, solution and persistence of certain human struggles as evidenced in folk tales; this suggests there is no division between generations and humans. Looking forward, in continuation with my research into shared lore, I hope to further explore connections between change of self and identity, mirrored in altered shared heritage.