The 8.30 am tube¹ is packed with crevices and creases. The whiff of a fellow passenger, the sweat of someone’s armpit, the warm, moist backs of knees. This resting on that. Twisted over, accidentally nudging, intentionally leaning. Sometimes I like to imagine lying myself down.

C. Lucy R Whitehead talks about “putting the body in a box”, using ceramic to take the body out of the box, off the ‘sky’, onto the table. The part is familiar and foreign.

The word Offal shares an etymological root with Abfall, the word for waste or the bit you chop off. The left over. Offal is wonderful, not just because of its rich nutrient density but because it’s nostalgic. It is a taste like no other meat. Melty, chewy, irony. The blood isn’t pumping here anymore. Blue is dominant and Lucy ruminates on cool colours, “faded Hollywood” out loud when we speak. What’s left is the shape of what was there (veins) or the thing itself?

At university² I was painting close ups of bodies large scale, navels and folded flesh. So was a fellow student, Erica - though she did belly buttons much better. Jenny Saville was peripatetic. Her photographs of bodies rammed and squashed against glass to ‘abstract’, manipulate and examine and present the gross beauty of magnified ambiguated flesh.

These forms are thinner, not of that sexy disgusting flesh. These are anonymous.

Worms Tubes Tongue tied

Inner tubes Sausages Elbows

Pillows Swan neck U-bends

Sewage Clots Only fans

Over lap Double up Arm band

Dead ends Fag butts Up-ends

Stub out Break faith Off beat

Back out Intestines You turn

Fat punctuation Lynch pin Stand in.

My son has an adorable habit of getting himself ‘fit’ into spaces between things and then announcing, ‘I stuck’! Somehow, he has registered the in between of two forms and can fit there to articulate himself and demonstrate he understands and measures the gap. He becomes a positive negative. A key feature of Barrett homes in the 1980s was the cul de sac. They offered a form of neighbourhood arena for kids to play out safely, surrounded but ignored, free but contained. “Architecture through the back door”³. Like scaffolding. This void space in Japanese is called ‘Ma’ and it’s the space between something, or the pause when talking about music.

Lucy’s innominate paintings, pokey drawings and ceramic shapes offer something vague enough to project onto. A holding space for an invented friend, something to project onto and personify- a squishmallow toy, a tamagotchi, an imaginary dog. My brother insisted he wanted a dog leash for his birthday even though we did not have a family pet, and he carried it around as if we it was attached to a real animal. This extended to leaving bowls out on the floor for the ‘dog’ and then to him insisting on eating his meals on the floor with the ‘dog’ The leash would hang in the hall when it wasn’t ‘used’ redundant and fulfilled.

Sometimes in trying to disappear something, it becomes larger than life.

In 3% of births the placenta is retained and must be removed in parts, by hand piece by piece, like a pizza from a deep oven.⁴ A modern development is to transform your placenta into something – pills, cream, a tree.⁵ Disfigured but still ‘of the body’, chunks of an unnameable part. Disgust, fascination and disappointment often register in the patient. 

‘If the bodily dimension of the comic takes place in the gap between being and having, between our souls and our arseholes, then this hole cannot be plugged or bunged up.’⁶

Before I spoke to Lucy I read that her parents and grandparents were medical. She said in an interview, “we had posters all over the house which showed cross-sections of feet and ears”.⁷ Historically it was traditional for artists to visit and study cadavers, learning and drawing from human bodies. Lucy’s memory of this is arm tingling. 

“The practitioner opened the body and put its heart in my hands. We passed it around. ‘That’s a human heart’ he said, and I thought, I’ll never hold this again. It felt important, affirmative, so small. All the working away it does for us and it all fits in one hand.”⁸

Out of body experiences are commonly recalled by patients who have survived a cardiac arrest.⁹ Watching oneself outside of the body, “when nothing feels attached”. 

‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’¹⁰

Gross, funny, lumpen. Holding hands is intimate because of the space in-between, we realise we ‘fit’ together. Hand holding is often the first close contact. Perhaps heart holding is romantic. One two three four I declare a thumb war. Pinned down and under force. Lucy’s early memories include her grandad working on feet as a physio, “all pressure points and pins”. Tic tac toe. Ironically, these ‘bodies’ can’t be pinned down. Asked where the forms start and end, how they are cut off or stuck on, pulled or moulded together, Lucy simply says, “Our feet are our endings”¹¹.

1. London Underground

2. 2004

3. Conversation with the artist, Friday 4 April 2025

4. What to expect when you’re expecting. Heidi Murkoff

5. Placenta encapsulation. https://www.placentapractice.co.uk

6. On Humour. Simon Critchley. Page 50.

7. From Interview in Metal Magazine with Arnau Salvado. https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/c-lucy-r-whitehead

8. Conversation with the artist, Friday 4 April 2025

9. Healthline magazine article. By Crystal Raypole. 22 July 2022

10. In a conversation with the artist, Friday 4 April 2025, she alluded to an interest in everyday sayings often turning to these in her titling. I wanted to include a proverb as a reference.

11. Quote from conversation with the artist, Friday 4 April 2025

Emma Cousin

Emma Cousin is a painter, drawer and writer based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Franciso (2024), Niru Ratnam, London (2024), Drawing Room, London (2021), White Cube, London (2021) and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, London (2020). Group exhibitions include Rhona Hoffman, Chicago (2023), Vesthoffen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2023), Jack Siebert Projects, Paris (2022) and Xiao Museum, China (2022). Her work is included in public collections, including, the Arts Council Collection, London; Xiao Museum, China; Zuzeum Museum, Riga, Latvia; Aishti Foundation, Lebanon and W Art Foundation, Hong Kong.

www.emmacousin.info | @emmacousin

C. Lucy R. Whitehead

C. Lucy R. Whitehead is a London-based artist. She holds a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Art and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Tabula Rasa in Beijing, Biscuit Gallery in Tokyo and Berntson Bhattacharjee in London, with a recent solo exhibition at Soho Revue in London. This year she is showing at NADA in New York with Megan Mulrooney Gallery, who will also be showcasing Whitehead’s first U.S. solo presentation in Los Angeles this Summer.

www.clucyrwhitehead.com | @c.lucy.r.whitehead