Lucie March
MFA ’23 Photography
Last summer, my girlfriend and I discovered a secret swimming hole, an old gravel pit that filled with water many years ago. The scene oscillates between idyllic and industrial – imagine Diana’s baths as a Superfund site. They say not to swim there; the water hasn’t been tested. We swam anyway because no one bothered us and we could be naked and we felt free.
We started trespassing into the active gravel pit right next door, when it was closed on Sundays. Things got feral and queer and downright strange. I began to think about this inhospitable place as a stage where I could make a case for the body as landscape and the landscape as body – where I could juxtapose pleasure and extraction.
I’d come home from the gravel pit and there would be rocks in my underwear. Time wasn’t passing so much as it was being passed and returned. We rearrange the land and so it becomes landscape, a record of our desires. Remove the gravel from the pit, spread it out onto the road, let the floods and the ice destroy it, and return it to the quarry like tetris pieces waiting to be churned back into gravel and reformed into the road from whence they came.
Featured in:
Lucie March (b. 1992) is an artist working with the still and moving image. She makes work about geological time and death and memory and that feeling you get when you close your eyes and the sun comes through your eyelids. She co-creates the quarterly zine Cul de Sac and lives in Somerville, MA.
