The Brooklyn Rail

Lucy Skaer lives on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, far from the centers of urban civilizational collapse most of us inhabit. The Outer Hebrides is a place where haystacks still exist, and sheep herds are moved in accordance with the cultic calendar. Skaer’s work has always inhabited long stretches of the timeline, incorporating materials like mahogany logs pulled from riverbeds. Her memorable use of old materials to pull the viewer into lost worlds and poetic dimensions is unique: time can move backwards. Here we see three haunting sculptures, Counting House I, II, and III (all 2025), made from the repurposed wood of her family’s timepiece, their grandfather clock. Engraved numerals added to the pieces reinforce the idea of a mysterious chronology. The philosopher Jean Gebser saw civilizations and their respective permutations of consciousness as layers built one on top of one another, like stratigraphy. For Gebser, all levels still existed simultaneously. Visiting former mutations on the timeline, like the magical structure where man still coexisted seamlessly with nature, could be a redeeming possibility.

Skaer’s world of quiet hillsides, free of industrial plastics and urban rot, feels more spiritually, artistically, and ecologically sustainable. Skaer’s art possesses a captivating charm that pulls the viewer into her rugged Scottish world and makes us long to join her on retreat. This is the rural ideal that Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys advocated with their Celtic nature quests but without the groups of acolytes and showmanship. Skaer’s works have a modesty and an intimacy that transports them into a private feminine realm. Her work engenders a quiet contemplation.

Wheat has been a symbol of the Eleusinian Mysteries and agricultural renewal since antiquity. Wheat belonged to Osiris, and the Egyptians impregnated mud effigies of the god with wheat kernels, which sprouted during the inundation of the Nile. The Greeks made exquisite gold ears of wheat which may have been in the cista mystica [mystic chest] of the Eleusinian Mysteries. It is postulated that the high point of the Mysteries was an “ear of grain cut in silence,” representing new life. On the surface of Counting House I, II, and III , we see tiny 22-karat gold ears of wheat that resemble flames lovingly placed across the wooden slabs. One Track Ledger (2025), a letterpress print in forty-five parts featuring ears of wheat, spans a wall like sheet music. It is hard not to think of a lost oral tradition where marks could denote pauses and breaths taken. Here punctuation in the form of commas, spaces, and periods appears in this mysterious writing using ears of wheat, like a long forgotten lost language used for counting.

Translated Skin and Broken Skin (both 2025) are a pair of porcelain hides which hark back to earlier works by the artist. Past hide sculptures, not seen in this exhibition, included Pelt I and Pelt II (both 2019), both covered in leaves and cast in bronze. The works reference ingots shaped like ox hides found in archaeological finds at Zakros on Crete. Other earlier, more complex cast bronze versions of hides include Forest under Glass and Forest on Fire (both 2020). The porcelain Translated Skin and Broken Skin remind one of clay cuneiform tablets, but here the marks resemble hairs.

The showstopper is the installation Shaken Ledger (2025), which spans a wall. Tiny tablets made of Karelian birch are also covered with marks resembling hairs. Skaer says the hairs on these plaques reference the wild man, a shaggy mythological figure from medieval Europe, always depicted covered with hair. There is something charming about seeing the wild man celebrated in these tiny notations on a multiplicity of plaques dotted across the wall. Another radical shift in scale happens with the bronze figures. The fallen warriors we usually think of are those tucked in the corners of temple pediments. Here, the warriors are shrunken down to something that can fit into the palm of a hand. The little bronze warriors have abstracted disc-like heads, usually associated with Cycladic figures. The way they cling to the wall—moving off a horizontal plane to cling to a vertical one—is fascinating. Both the wild man and the fallen warrior, masculine figures of strength, have been reduced in scale and brought into an intimate feminine sphere. The warriors and plaques are surrounded by orange peels that have been cast in metal and enameled and painted.

Equivalent for the Haystacks I and Equivalent for the Haystacks II (both 2025) are groupings of graphite drawings on paper—the first is comprised of ten panels, the second of sixteen. They are machine-made: the images are drawn on a computer and then rendered with an AxiDraw, a machine that makes a continuous graphite line. Here, all of Walter Benjamin’s arguments about auras being lost in an age of mechanical reproduction fall on deaf ears. There is a ghost in this machine. These works are haunting, and Skaer humanizes mechanization with a rare mastery and mystery!

Equivalent for the Haystacks III (2025) is a grouping of flat-cast bronze wall pieces taken from hay bales and haystacks. Here, items farmers put into the category of drudgery have been elevated. “Bringing in the sheaves” regains its former religious status celebrated in the old hymn. This raising of the agricultural and the commonplace is part of the magic of Skaer’s art, and she once again takes her cues from antiquity. In our world, which has lost the spiritual connection to the cycles of agricultural renewal once celebrated in the Mysteries, Skaer’s works stand out and her objects take on greater meaning. They become objects of veneration and contemplation, much needed in our environmentally and spiritually barren time. Skaer is one of the most important artists working today, and this exhibition is a must see.