C Lucy R Whitehead: Cuckoo Land

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Cuckoo Land, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist C Lucy R Whitehead. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery, and will be on view from July 12 – August 28, 2025.

In Cuckoo Land, the body is rendered object: soft and tubular, faceless and nameless. Each composition features a curling form that is unmistakably fleshy. Plush and pillowy in texture, her forms are reminiscent of limbs or torsos that have been distended and exorcised of any phalange or protrusion that might interrupt their smooth surfaces. The limits of the forms determine the borders of the compositions themselves, making the canvas a kind of container for each of them. Reading less as people than as specimens in jars, sealed off and preserved, they lurch toward the anatomical only to recoil into the imaginary. Across the exhibition, it seems that what Whitehead depicts are alien specimens pretending to be bodily, moving through our world without narrative or soul.   

Previously, Whitehead’s figures have floated in neutral space, but here she places them into shallow, vaguely defined landscapes. They rest on seaside shores, expansive deserts, and nighttime hillsides against vast skyscapes and striking horizons that domesticate the biomorphic forms only to heighten their inhumanity. They interlock, press, and fold into themselves in a kind of frozen embrace, giving rise to a sense of intimacy and strangeness in equal measure.

Built from drawings and maquettes sculpted in plasticine, the paintings are highly composed yet retain the intuitive logic of a reverie. Color guides the emotional register – grounded in a palette of pinkish tones, the works gain a sense of theatricality from their vibrant backgrounds, which lend a light, cosmetic charge befitting the exhibition’s title.  

While distinct in approach, Whitehead’s work echoes a lineage of artists who have abstracted the body into soft, ambiguous forms: the structural pliancy of Eva Hesse’s Laocoon, the psychological architectures of Louise Bourgeois’s Cells, and Sarah Lucas’ bawdy Bunnies. These precedents offer a useful context for understanding Whitehead’s tubular and bodily formal vocabulary, but her sensibility differs: rather than registering psychic, physical, or social rupture, the figures in Cuckoo Land are rendered with scientific, observational detachment.

Still, they flirt with the absurd. There is humor in treating the body as a studied object, a soft, squishy thing without identity or meaning. By stripping away personality, expression, and affect, her work offers a lighter way of viewing corporeality: as casing, as specimen, as material fact. 

C. Lucy R. Whitehead (b. 1991, Liverpool, UK; lives and works in London) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and her BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Art. She is a current recipient of the DYCP Grant from Arts Council England and the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship. Recent exhibitions include Trafalgar Avenue, London; Soho Revue, London; Small Is Beautiful, Flowers Gallery, London; More Than Meets The Eye, Mint, Munich; and The Consolation of Clinamen, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing.