Nancy Lupo's artistic journey, as unveiled in her latest exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol, is a captivating exploration of the elusive nature of home and the fantasies that surround it. Lupo, an artist-turned-novelist, presents a unique perspective on the contemporary struggle to find a sense of belonging in a constantly changing world. Through her installation, 'Several Chickens Later', Lupo delves into the idea that the dream house, a fantasy of being moored, is a fragile and ever-shifting concept.
One of the most striking elements of Lupo's work is her use of yellow napkins in 'Hark'. These napkins, filtered through plastic cases and taped to the skylights, create a disorienting effect, akin to the insomniac time of night which is also morning. The yellow firmament flickers, and Lupo has augmented a small, incidental object-theatre into a sublime practical effect, creating a pervasive yellow haze that washes over the junior-size, jewellike architectural feature in the centre of the room. This is 'The Enclosure', a three-quarter-scale, highly polished replica of a Victorian bay window, which invites visitors to sit inside and contemplate the fragility of their own fantasies.
Lupo's fascination with the original bay window is evident in her previous work at the Fiorucci Foundation's Chelsea apartment in London. There, she listed the apartment for sale, inviting visitors to experience the fantasy architecture as a distinct, mostly hollowed-out object. The show was archly conceptual, an incongruent lens through which to fathom Lupo's more emotive, overarching narrative project. At Spike Island, Lupo articulates the pathos of her attenuating fantasy more convincingly through the weird, intimately wrought objects that make up her subdued, glimmering finale.
The 'tellers' in 'The Mirage' are ground-level, wilted pyramidal sculptures formed from layers of glue, patterned paper towels, and pearlescent paint. These sculptures, which Lupo methodically applies and reapplies onto balsa wood armatures, are often repurposed between shows, their signification apparently leasable. In 'Disko', Lupo's 2025 exhibition at Kunstverein Kevin in Vienna, the tellers became abstract stand-ins for icebergs, relating to a massive calving event she witnessed in Greenland. In Bristol, however, the tellers fold and wilt pathetically under the laminations of glue, as though, having been passed from context to context and burdened with accretions of meaning, they arrive at Lupo's denouement anthropomorphically enacting their failure to be anything really – even upright.
The fall leaves, dispersals of paper towels patterned with Thanksgiving-style autumn leaves, accumulate around the tellers at the edges of the room. These leaves, carefully peeled apart and positioned over vertical, pistonlike motors that cause successive areas of the gathered, diaphanous textile to rise and fall like breathing, add a sense of childlike busywork and sloughed-off quality to the installation. If, according to Meow Meow Real Estate's unnamed narrator, 'The point is the fantasy of being moored', the leafy napkins that accumulate at the fringes of the main gallery in 'Several Chickens Later' have none of the implied velocity of those in 'Our Villas' and no nails to latch onto, no mooring. It seems apropos then that at the end of her quest, with nowhere left to go, Lupo makes a magical, anthropomorphic insinuation, animating the untethered napkins as objects of fantasy, enchanting them.
Lupo's theatrical, sculptural meditations on the tremulous situation of our fantasies cunningly involve a challenged sense of immersion. The breathing motors, for example, are visible through the delicate paper towels – no effort is made to mask their battery-powered whir; 'The Enclosure's' playhouse proportions rise to shoulder height when I crouch inside; and the hallucinatory, pervasive yellow that fills the room is attributable to the ubiquitous cocktail napkins that comprise 'Hark', taped to the skylight overhead. Ambivalence, giftshop pathos, and a sense of thwarted majesty live in these objects, giving the dream house tenuous, precious form. If these sculptures are moorings, securing the dream to some kind of material reality, then Lupo has tied a loose and fugitive knot.
In conclusion, Nancy Lupo's work at Spike Island is a thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary struggle to find a sense of home and belonging. Through her unique use of objects and installations, Lupo challenges our perceptions of reality and fantasy, inviting us to contemplate the fragility and ambiguity of our own dreams. Her work is a testament to the power of art to provoke thought and emotion, and to the enduring human need for a sense of place and connection.
