Rivers, Tributaries and Sea in Lucia Sceranková’s Work
The work of Lucia Sceranková (1985) has been so strongly and long associated with the medium of photography that we tend to forget that Lucia began her artistic career as a painter and that she first had entered the realm of technical imagery through moving images. This personal prehistory of hers, even after all these years, may not be a completely irrelevant fact. It is as if a grain of sand from a different, non-photographic way of thinking that her photography work builds up on remains in her approaches to this day. This other entity, which influences the form of her pictures over time, may surprisingly be something other than the two artistic disciplines mentioned above – namely sculpture.
The hypothesis may have some connection with her “family anamnesis”. Lucia's father, Peter Sceranka (1955–1999), was a sculptor and her sister Pavla, five years her senior, also became a sculptor. However, we must look for the main support for our argument in her own works, even in the early ones created during the final phase of her art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2009–2011. Probably the first to notice her “sculptural sensibilitiy” was artist Michal Pěchouček in a text for her solo art show “Ako doma” (Like at Home) at Prague’s Galerie 35m2 in 2009. At that time, Lucia still presented the video together with a kind of tower patched together with playing cards, i.e., with a real 3D object. The artist’s later transition to photography did not make this sensitivity disappear; Lucia just moved the “sculpture” in front of the camera lens – as part of a spatial-object arrangement, often a three-dimensional collage. The inconsistencies caused by these interventions in the photographed environment, or, in her words, "non-digital manipulations," began to play a role of disruptors of the natural perception of the scenes, introducing the unsettling but playful elements as well as an aspect of fiction that opened up space for imagination.
This feature of Lucia’s artistic work stands out against the background of constant “buts” when characterizing the author as a “photographer.” After all, she herself confirms this by never ceasing to include both videos as well as specific photo objects in her exhibitions, whose spatial and material solutions develop the depicted theme. Between 2011 and 2015, she succeeded in developing her own repertoire of themes and approaches. In her collections, she combined motifs of female bodies, landscapes, and the elements, but always strove to find a counterpart to the large and sublime in the small, intimate, and ordinary. In her photographs, the microcosm of everyday props encountered the arranged foam of the sea surf or the flowing manes of galloping horses, while marshes inhabited apartment interiors. A snow-covered mountain landscape shone unusually brightly, as it was a photograph printed on a plastic bag. The setting sun reflected on the water surface was actually a mirror placed on a lacquered chest of drawers
Probably the best account of her basic principles was give to Respekt magazine when she commented on her series “Staré světlo“ (Old Light) presented in the final exhibition of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2014: "The title is based on the fact that the particles of sunlight we feel on our faces every day may be incredibly old, but it has more of a metaphorical function. The exhibition does not aim to capture the vertigo of space and the immensity of time. On the contrary, things return to a personal scale, concealing micro-events and elements of exaggeration. They deal with the subjective perception and experience of the passage of time as an uncontrollable force and our efforts to gain control where it is impossible.” This is perhaps where we should mention the parallels between Lucia's work and some of her sister Pavla's mobile objects, in which she used the attraction and orbits of celestial bodies as a metaphor for the everyday reality of interpersonal relationships. Well, it seems to run in the family, one would like to say. In the same breath, though, it should be added that this sisterly artistic closeness does not weaken the work of either of them and can only be perceived as a kind of complementary overlap between two distinctive artistic personalities.
It was reasonable to include Lucia’s older photographic collections in the culminating wave of “the reflection on the medium of photography” which responded to the advent of digital technology by examining conditions at the turn of the first decade of the 21st century. After all, if she had entered the Czech scene a decade earlier, the roots of her aesthetics in the DIY creative processes that entered Czech art at the turn of the millennium would probably have been reflected more noticeably.
However, Lucia always transcended these two formalistic categories by using a kind of material imagination. The properties of elements and materials in her photographs always played an emotional and psychological role and they seemed to take us back to a pre-scientific understanding of the world, where a stone could be endowed with material weight just as with the weight of a soul. That’s why we need not hesitate to describe Lucie Sceranková's work as contemplative – even in those cases where calm is replaced by unrest and exciting drama.
In an exhibition at the Zahorian & Van Espen gallery in Prague in 2018, she focused on playing with scale. In the spatial installation of small obelisks in fine sand in front of a photographic wall, she reduced these monumental memorials to such an extent that they looked almost like cute toys. All the more so that she used real toys, flexible figures by the Japanese brand Max Factory, as models for the photographs on the walls. The action figures played the role of three lofty artistic depictions of man: Michelangelo's "David," Rodin's "The Thinker," and Leonardo da Vinci's “Vitruvian Man”. This was not the first time she had spoken so openly about the male world. Her older photograph of a crumpled reproduction of Bernini's sculpture "The Abduction of Proserpina" was created because of a detailed depiction of male violence, which, when specifically cropped, could be interpreted as a mere passionate embrace. In the "Table Museum" exhibition, though, she looked at this world, the world shaped by ideals of heroism and physical and spiritual perfection, with a much broader perspective. She turned the lofty cultural prototypes into the images of men who were small, somewhat awkward and funny, but at the same time touchingly vulnerable. This undoubtedly critical play with size/grandeur could therefore not be perceived as insensitive and unsympathetic, which opened the door to more layered interpretations of the entire collection.
The subject of male identity is yet to receive more of her attention. However, it seems to foreshadow Lucia's return to the elements, especially to one of them – water, which she views in connection with the female body, motherhood, and physical and emotional experiences. From the vast number of possible, often contradictory meanings attributed to water, she chooses those that can metaphorically embrace the inner experience of the flow of vital energy, further enhanced by the experience of pregnancy and the birth of a human being. She takes photographs on the seashore or by mountain rivers, sometimes arranging the scenes with strips of human skin to create an allegory of permeation and becoming one with the clear waters. This may bring to mind the famous painting "Ophelia" by English painter John Everett Millais. But instead of death by tragic drowning, Lucia's immersion in the water element offers us the fullness of life in the awareness of bond between humanity and water.
In 2025, when Lucia’s profile on artycok.tv and this text were created, we see the author going through a second phase of her creative career. In it, she builds upon proven formal practices and reemphasizes the power of the elements to stir the human imagination. Lately, however, she has been attempting to channel this imagination toward a specific range of topics, primarily her more intense experience with female physicality in recent years. This is undeniably happening in a cultural situation where the "female experience" in its broadest sense has become increasingly visible and desirable.
In 2025, it’s also worth remembering that this text has covered only fifteen years of Lucia's artistic journey. It will thus be interesting to try to write about Lucia again in another fifteen years.
Jiří Ptáček
Script assistance: Insar Shaken
