Lucy Orta

Potential Architecture explores the recent architectural projects of Paris-based artist collaborative Lucy + Jorge Orta, founded in 1991. Through drawing and sculpture, the artists apply ideas from cell biology to the universal concerns of community, shelter, migration and sustainable development.

Lucy Orta's various projects are united by a common theme--the staging of a social bond. Her transverse approach to poetic expression forms the core of her exploration of that traumatic space between public and private, and her attention to the individual's struggle against adverse conditions. Essential to this is her training as a fashion designer, a skill which she uses to dramatize the social and psychological implications of clothing and housing. Politically provocative and artistically engaging, her interventions struggle against the exclusion of certain groups and individuals from society's central spaces, and combine architecture, body art, street theater, fashion, social therapy, formal poetry, and ideological activism.
Born in Britain in 1966, Orta has lived and worked in Paris since 1991, and has exhibited her work all over the world--in New York, Paris, London, Mexico City, Antwerp and at the Johannesburg and Venice Biennials.