Lucy Skaer is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

.

Skaer was born in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art

Glasgow School of Art

Glasgow School of Art is one of only two independent art schools in Scotland, situated in the Garnethill area of Glasgow.-History:It was founded in 1845 as the Glasgow Government School of Design. In 1853, it changed its name to The Glasgow School of Art. Initially it was located at 12 Ingram...

 from 1993 to 1997, graduating with a BA Hons in Fine Art. She currently lives and works in Glasgow and London.

Much of her work consists of her interacting with, and changing, public spaces. In one piece, she took up a paving stone on Glasgow

Glasgow

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...

's Buchanan Street and then had the Earl

Earl

An earl is a member of the nobility. The title is Anglo-Saxon, akin to the Scandinavian form jarl, and meant "chieftain", particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king's stead. In Scandinavia, it became obsolete in the Middle Ages and was replaced with duke...

 of Glasgow ceremoniously lay down a replacement, while in an Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

-based piece, she left a nd

ND

- Places :* North Dakota, a state in the United States* New Delhi * Notre Dame , for a number of churches and colleges- Science and medicine :* Neodymium, an element with the symbol "Nd"...

 and a scorpion

Scorpion

Scorpions are predatory arthropod animals of the order Scorpiones within the class Arachnida. They have eight legs and are easily recognized by the pair of grasping claws and the narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward curve over the back, ending with a venomous stinger...

 side-by-side on a pavement. She has also secretly hidden moth

Moth

A moth is an insect closely related to the butterfly, both being of the order Lepidoptera. Moths form the majority of this order; there are thought to be 150,000 to 250,000 different species of moth , with thousands of species yet to be described...

 and butterfly

Butterfly

A butterfly is a mainly day-flying insect of the order Lepidoptera, which includes the butterflies and moths. Like other holometabolous insects, the butterfly's life cycle consists of four parts: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Most species are diurnal. Butterflies have large, often brightly coloured...

 pupa

Pupa

A pupa is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The pupal stage is found only in holometabolous insects, those that undergo a complete metamorphosis, going through four life stages; embryo, larva, pupa and imago...

e in criminal courts in the hope that they will hatch in mid-trial.

Skaer has also exhibited drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s and is a member of the Henry VIII’s Wives collective of artists.

In 2003, Skaer was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures

Beck's Futures

Beck's Futures was a British art prize founded by London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and sponsored by Beck's beer given to contemporary artists....

 prize.

In 2008 Skaer was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Fruitmarket Gallery

Fruitmarket Gallery

The Fruitmarket Gallery is an art gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is located in the centre of the city on Market Street, beside Edinburgh Waverley train station....

 in Edinburgh, Scotland which included newly commissioned work. There was a comprehensive monograph published to accompany the show. Her most recent major solo exhibition is ‘A Boat Used As A Vessel’, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (April 2009 - June 2009).

In April 2009, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

 for the sculptures Black Alphabet and Leviathan Edge. (She lost out to Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright

Richard Wright (artist)

Richard Wright is a British artist and musician.Wright was born in London. His family moved to Scotland when he was young. He attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1978 to 1982 and studied at Glasgow School of Art between 1993 and 1995 studying for a Master of Fine Art...

).

Lucy Skaer is represented by doggerfisher, Edinburgh.

External links

• Saatchi Gallery Additional information on Lucy Skaer including artworks, articles, text panels and full biography
• Interview with Lucy Skaer from MAP Magazine