source: studio-orta

After graduating with an honours degree in fashion-knitwear design from Nottingham Trent University in 1989, Lucy began practicing as a visual artist in Paris in 1991.

Her sculptural work investigates the boundaries between the body and architecture, exploring their common social factors, such as communication and identity. Lucy uses the media of sculpture, public intervention, video, and photography to realize her work. Her most emblematic artworks include Refuge Wear and Body Architecture (1992–98), portable, lightweight, and autonomous structures representing issues of survival. Nexus Architecture (1994–2002) is a series of participative interventions in which a variable number of people wear suits connected to each other, shaping modular and collective structures. When recorded in photography and video, these interventions visualize the concept of social links. Urban Life Guards (2004–ongoing) are wearable objects that reflect on the body as a metaphorical supportive structure.

Lucy’s work has been the focus of major survey exhibitions at the Weiner Secession, Austria (1999); the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of South Florida, for which she received the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts award (2001); and the Barbican Centre, London (2005). She is a Professor of Art and the Environment at the University of the Arts London and was the inaugural Rootstein Hopkins Chair at London College of Fashion from 2002–7. From 2002–5 was the head of Man & Humanity, a pioneering master program that stimulates socially driven and sustainable design, which she co-founded with Li Edelkoort at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2002.
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source: mymodernmet

A wonderfully whimsical new art installation was just unveiled in London. Called “‘Cloud I Meteoros,” it shows gray statues sitting on top of two fluffy-looking white clouds. Suspended above the historic Barlow Shed of London’s St Pancras Station, the public artwork was created by British sculptor Lucy Orta and her husband Jorge.

A warm and charming welcome to the nearly one million visitors to the station each week, the installation shows travelers taking a magic carpet ride into an imaginary journey in the skies.

As the artists state on their website, “Meteoros is a word derived from ancient Greek, meaning raised from the ground, suspended, lofty or in the midst. Clouds have long been intercessors between reality and the imagination, between heaven and earth, lightness and gravity. They inhabit the skies of Renaissance fresco paintings, often depicted crowded with laymen and prophets, angels and deities. Throughout history, this celestial vault has been a site of conviviality, of learning and exchange.”

This installation will be up until the end of 2013. Love the surreal feeling to them.