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Print (MA)

Lucie Holzer

Lucie (b.1995, London) uses drawing, print and sculpture to create landscapes and dreamscapes which activate discursive non-linear temporalities. She graduated with a BA (hons) in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art in 2017 where she received the Royal Glasgow Institute Graduate Award. She will graduate with an MA in Print from The Royal College of Art in 2023. Lucie has exhibited in a variety of galleries and project spaces in London and Glasgow, most recently at Southwark Park Galleries and The Pump House Gallery. As an artist concerned with the politics and poetics of place, residencies have informed the development of Lucie’s practice. In particular, a residency at Dumfries House in Ayrshire catalysed her exploration of architecture and memory which have become key sites of interest in her work at the RCA.

Degree Details

School of Arts & HumanitiesPrint (MA)RCA2023 at Truman Brewery

Truman Brewery, F Block, Ground, first and second floors

Haunted Shelter, 2023, Screen Print on Copper, 75x75cm.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals something else.”

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

I have recurring dreams about walking in circles, with no destination, through the heath behind the house I grew up in. I am trying to trace connections between past, present and future in places where the air is thick and heavy with memories. Spaces that reverberate with lived histories and potential futures all inextricably wrapped up in each other fascinate me. These landscapes have their own temporal climate which makes room for drifting and daydreaming as subtle forms of resistance to corporate, ahistorical approaches to urban space. I photograph these places as I encounter them in my every-day life, from the concrete ghosts of modernist projects to liminal borderlands where the city dissolves into canals, heaths and other untamed spaces. Images from this photographic archive are recreated through a forensic process of drawing. Repetitive, laborious approaches to mark making lengthen and pay homage to ephemeral and profound experiences of the overlooked.  

Screen-printing enables drawings to migrate from image to object, taking on fresh associations as they engage with a diverse array of surfaces. Seemingly ubiquitous urban objects are warped and transfigured, rebuilt in steel, copper, clay and wood. This uncanny transmutation emphasises the unfixed, malleable nature of the spaces they originate from. Layered images and unexpected material fusions create hybrid landscapes, operating as archaeological sites, where histories both personal and collective are built and buried.

Screen Printed and Spray-Painted Steel, Screen Printed Sandbags, Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Custom Printed Stickers
Dream Instructional: How to Stay Completely Still by Walking in a Circle2023, Screen Printed and Spray-Painted Steel, Screen Printed Sandbags, Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Custom Printed Stickers, Dimensions Variable approx. 2mx3mx2.5m.
Steel signs screen printed with black and white images of architectural structures
Signs from Dream Instructional: How to Stay Completely Still by Walking in a Circle2023, Screen Print on Steel, Steel Frames, Each Steel Plate is 75x75cm.
Screen Printed and Spray-Painted Steel, Screen Printed Sandbags, Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Custom Printed Stickers
Dream Instructional: How to Stay Completely Still by Walking in a Circle (detail)2023, Screen Printed and Spray-Painted Steel, Screen Printed Sandbags, Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Custom Printed Stickers, Dimensions Variable approx. 2mx3mx2.5m.
Screen printed black sandbags with an urban image of a landscape with bridge printed on them in white ink
Sandbags from Dream Instructional: How to Stay Completely Still by Walking in a Circle2023, Screen Printed Sandbags, Each 45x 80x 25cm.
Layered blue and white screen print of a bridge leading over a railway on copper
Railway Bridge2023, Screen Print on Copper, 75x75cm
Layered blue and white screen print on copper of a modernist building in the shadow of trees
Blue Window2022, Screen Print on Copper, 50x50cm.

“Every new body is a new mask, is permission, is something giving nothing a right to exist. That is to say, the city needs the performance in order to be itself… For Eko to stay real, ghosts must continue to pass as people, but people also continue to fizzle to ghosts.”

Vagabonds, Eloghosa Osunde

If you screen print onto metal whilst the layer below is still wet parts of the image are lifted, revealing buried histories, ghostly traces that swarm to the surface.

Sometimes an image burned on a silk-screen refuses to fully wash off. The image that clings to the screen even as it is reused is called a ghost.

I want everything I make to be alive with ghosts, slippages in the process of making that destabilise the relationship between front and back, full and empty, past and future.

Digital print image of a house next to a tree on fire, surrounded by smaller images of ominous overgrown landscapes
Screenshots from the Quietest Place on Earth2023, Digital Inkjet Print on Japanese Kozo Paper, 1mx1m35cm.
Two screen printed wooden pieces in the shape of buildings attached to one another with a chain
Building Homes for Ghosts2022, Screen Printed MDF, Ink and Colored Pencil on Paper, Chain, Lock, 1mx75cm.
Detailed black and white linear ink drawing of an overgrown shelter on a heath
Shelter2023, Ink on Paper, 50x70cm.
Black and white ink drawing of a tree lined slope leading onto a bridge
Threshold2023, Ink on Paper, 50x70cm.
Dense ink drawing of a bench inside a shelter surrounded by foliage
Secret Bench2022, Ink on Paper, 59x84cm.
Black and white ink drawing of an AI generated landscape originating from a photograph of a place near my childhood home
Shadows Bend to Face the Sun2022, Ink on Paper, 50x70cm.
Print in white on black background of an ominous overgrown staircase
Event Horizon I2023, Digital Inkjet Print on Hahnemuhle German Etching Paper, 70x100cm.
Print in white on black background of an overgrown architectural structure with a warning sign
Event Horizon II2023, Digital Inkjet Print on Hahnemuhle German Etching Paper, 70x100cm.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”

Sans Soleil, dir. Chris Marker


Many of my earliest memories are shaped by photographs of my own childhood. I have begun to question the legitimacy of these recollections: are they real or just tricks of the imagination, fictitious histories inspired by photographs?

As I feed images of landscapes surrounding the house I grew up in through an AI image generator, they acquire the quality of memory- uncanny, simultaneously familiar and strange. The screen of my laptop becomes a malleable, shifting terrain where alternative pasts and speculative futures proliferate unchecked. In these liquid worlds, light no longer obeys the rules of physics, text becomes fragmentary and illegible, signage glitches. Still, these artificial memories sometimes feel more real than a photograph could ever be. When I find one of these realer than real images, I coax it out of the screen by drawing. 

A grid of small black and white ink drawings of modernist buildings on graph paper
Modern Artefacts2022, Ink Drawings on Graph Paper, Each 15x21cm.
A wall sculpture composed of geometric shapes cut out of perspex and plywood and printed with images of modernist buildings
Fragmentation2022, Screen Printed and Painted Plywood and Perspex, 1.85x 1.75cm.
Layered image of geometric brutalist buildings in vibrant oranges and reds
Hot Concrete2022, Screen Print on Paper, 70x100cm.
Layered blue and green screen print of a modernist building in the shadow of trees
Blue Ruin2022, Screen Print on Paper, 70x100cm.
Abstracted image of a brutalist spiral staircase layered on images of other architectural structures in reds and oranges
Spiral2022,Screen Print on Paper, 70x100cm.
Layered blue, teal and silver screen print of a brutalist building by water
Water and Stone2022,Screen Print on Paper, 70x100cm.
Small artists publication, showing two pages with layered black and white prints of brutalist buildings
Selected Pages From Concrete Ghosts2023, Concertina Book Composed of 30 Digital Inkjet Prints on Japanese Kozo Paper, Edition of Four, 10x15x1.5cm when folded.
Small artists publication, showing two pages with layered black and white prints of brutalist buildings
Selected Pages From Concrete Ghosts2023, Concertina Book Composed of 30 Digital Inkjet Prints on Japanese Kozo Paper, Edition of Four, 10x15x1.5cm when folded.

“A city- any city, every city- is the eradication, even the ruin, of the landscape from which it arose…

To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories”

The Ruins of Memory, Rebecca Solnit


Amidst a continually expanding desert of luxury housing and corporate non-places, modernist buildings linger like memories from a dream that never came to fruition. These concrete spectres make me nostalgic for lives I have never lived- places I have never been, futures that never emerged. I became interested in documenting hauntological fragments of post-war architecture to deterritorialise the notion of a discrete historical incident and unearth temporally dormant dreams of a future beyond neoliberal materialism. Perhaps memory can activate disruptive and discursive temporalities that challenge the processes of privatisation and cultural cleansing underpinning contemporary urban redevelopment projects. 

Bold primary coloured ceramic signs installed in a heap surrounded by spray painted chains made of air drying clay
Roads to Nowhere2023, Glazed Stoneware and Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Dimensions Variable approx. 1.5x2.5m.
Two ink drawings of grafiti, one piece of grafiti reads the word 'yours' and the other reads 'mine'
Ours diptych,2023, Ink on Paper, Each 70x100cm.
ink drawing of gestural graffiti marks
Vital Signs2023, Ink on Paper, 50x70cm.
Ink and Coloured pencil drawing of a sign defaced by grafiti
Things Like Painting2023, Ink and Coloured Pencil on Paper, 59x84cm.
Sign like abstract clay objects arranged on the floor amongst red chains
Leaving Meaning 2023, Stoneware and Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Dimensions Variable, approx. 2m x 3m.
Sign like abstract clay objects arranged on the floor amongst red chains
Leaving Meaning 2023, Stoneware and Spray-Painted Air-Drying Clay, Dimensions Variable, approx. 2m x 3m.

I have become interested in the canal as a heterotopia that disrupts conventional passages through the city, creating unexpected connections between places. I have spent a lot of time there, thinking about gestural painting, authorship, loneliness, cultural memory and defaced signage. Dense accretions of graffiti, scrawled over so many times they crumble into illegibility, mirror the palimpsestic, poly-temporal nature of the city. In moments of stillness this semiotic detritus takes on a profound significance. It feels like a human presence, an attempt at communication, a gesture of care. 

Drawings from this series translate graffiti marks into a laborious process of drawing. I am trying to deconstruct masculinist histories of gestural painting and gendered labour through the lens of public space. Through process I am developing an embodied understanding of what happens when something immediate, performative and public becomes a quiet, laborious, solitary activity.