Lucy Cash: Artists in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery

The Whitechapel Gallery’s schools programme includes year-long collaborations between artists, students and teachers. Artist and Filmmaker Lucy Cash worked with a group of year 10 Art and Design BTEC students at Central Foundation School for Girls, Tower Hamlets, from September 2011 to October 2012. The project My Body Folded Like a Map encompasses moving image, photography, performance and writing. Lucy Cash is interested in the subtle choreographies underpinning everyday experiences. She draws on associative processes, making connections between the familiar and the unexpected. Cash’s installation is the result of the students’ investigation into the local neighbourhood. The group worked to make a collective statement through large scale images of each other’s eyes, overcoming an initial resistance to being portrayed. These images reveal as much as they conceal, as they are built on trust and intimacy, playing with scale and anonymity. Fly-posted on hoardings in the school, they have elicited interaction with the wider community.