Lucy Ramsay (she/her) is a contemporary mixed-media artist originally from Ngunnawal country (Canberra) and living and practicing in Narrm/Melbourne. Graduating at RMIT from her Bachelor of Fine Art, she majored in printmaking with a specific interest in etching and textiles. Lucy embarked on an exchange program at Glasgow School of Art in 2022, where she focused on lithography and immersed herself among Scottish youth subcultures and local pubs, sparking ideas for her Honours project. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both locally and internationally. In her Honours year, Lucy explores notions of Australian identity and drinking cultures through honing processes of printmaking, large scale drawings, rug making, ceramics and installation.
My practice-led Honours project investigates how humour and contemporary mixed-media art practice can be used to critique the ritual of ‘sesh’ culture and its links to Australian identity. The ‘sesh’, a cultural colloquialism, can be defined as a ‘session‘ in which binge drinking and drug use take place alongside rituals, activities and games that typically accompany these spaces. Acknowledging the stolen Aboriginal land I live and practice on, this research situates the ‘sesh’ within its historical and theoretical context, noting its Anglo-Australian cultural identity and historical links to colonialism and the introduction of alcohol along with the role of ritual, gender, class and sin. Informed by caricature and satire as well as the work of artists such as Reg Mombasa, Nan Goldin, George Cruikshank and Hieronymus Bosch, the research takes a mixed-methods approach, utilising memory, field research, Autonomism and writing to unpack my personal experience of ‘sesh’ culture and its enduring impact on Australian notions of national identity.
