Sarah Lucas b. 1962
; Sculpture: 28.6 x 30.5 x 12.7 cm (11 1/4 x 12 x 5 in) HLW each
; Pedestal: 70 x 70 x 90 cm (27 9/16 x 27 9/16 x 35 7/16 in)
LOTTO DESPERATE (2018) by Sarah Lucas comprises a pair of concrete boots cast directly from her worn footwear. Preserving the creases, seams, and heavy tread of the original object, the sculpture transforms an everyday item into a durable monument to lived experience. A painted Union Jack—the national flag of the United Kingdom—stretches across each toe cap, layering a symbol of national identity onto an object long associated with manual labor and culturally coded masculinity.
The boots belong to a recurring motif throughout Lucas’s practice. Since the early 1990s, they have appeared in her self-portraits and installations alongside jeans, bomber jackets, and cigarettes, functioning as signifiers of gender performance and masculine identity. Lucas has spoken about wearing Dr. Martens herself and the gendered insults they provoked, revealing how a seemingly ordinary item of clothing can become charged with assumptions about gender and sexuality [1]. In LOTTO DESPERATE, the absent body leaves the boots to carry those associations, functioning simultaneously as traces of the artist and a subtle challenge to fixed ideas of gender.
Throughout her career, Lucas has mined the semantic possibilities of everyday objects, returning repeatedly to materials and symbols embedded in British popular culture whose meanings are shaped by social convention. By casting her own boots in concrete and overlaying them with the Union Jack, she links ideas of labor, masculinity, and Britishness, suggesting that identity is constructed as much through cultural symbols as through the body itself. The sculpture thus functions as both a self-portrait and an irreverent reflection on identity, gender, and vernacular culture.
[1] Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton, eds., Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (London and New York: Phaidon, in association with the New Museum, 2018).