Lucy Hodgson

Lucy Hodgson (born 1940 in Damariscotta, Maine) is an American sculptor and printmaker based in the New England and New York City. For years, her work celebrated the emotive power of land and seascapes. More recently it focused on her anger and disapproval of the destruction of the environment, particularly by the oil and gas industry and the recent controversy surrounding fracking and the Keystone Pipeline. Her background in anthropology was highly influential because it seemed to better address the relationship between art and culture than more traditional academic art curricula.

Early in her career, the artist worked and gained skills at The Printmaking Workshop in New York City. Hodgson taught printmaking there as at Franklin and Marshall College where she also taught drawing.. She is affiliated with SOHO 20 Artists Inc., has had fourteen solo exhibitions, and participated in numerous group exhibitions in New England and around the world. Her work is in a number of public and private collections, including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Biblioteque Nationale, and the New York University Print Collection, as well as AT&T, Long Lines, Seiko, the Manufacturers Hanover Bank, Citicorp, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Chase Manhattan Bank. The trunk was still rooted and alive, which provided extra challenges in the work, but was characteristic of her interest in organic forms and natural forces. She acknowledged that the trunk was impermanent, and certainly subject to change through the passage of time, but rejected the idea that art must be permanent.

Shingle sculptures River's Revenge (2004) was part of the Sculpture In & By the River exhibition curated by Ann Jon on the banks of the Housatonic River in Massachusetts on the grounds of the Norman Rockwell Museum. The exhibition drew attention to the endangered river, historically and environmentally; thus, Hodgson's work was a natural fit, with her interest in the history of the region and environmental issues. Hodgson created a "snaking, writhing form made of New England house shingles, a testimony to the destructive power of floods," of which the Housatonic has a long history. She initially used shingles as bases for sculptures but became "interested in them for their own qualities." It portrays a tidal bore, in which the incoming tide forms waves that travel up a river or inlet against the current. Her earliest undulating shingle sculpture, Surge (2003), fabricated originally for a World Heritage site at the Schokland Museum, Ens, NL, was later among the works in the Flux Art Fair (2016), in which art was positioned in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, NYC.

Recent work More recent work, Pipelines and Power Stations (2013), concerns the destruction of the natural environment, specifically caused by hydraulic fracturing, through a series of pump-like forms made of twisting welded pipes.

Awards and honors Hodgson has been awarded residencies in South Korea and Hungary, as well as funding from The Netherlands America Foundation (2003). In 2004, she was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony.