Sarah Lucas (born Holloway, London, 1962) is a contemporary British artist. One of the leading figures in the generation of young British artists who emerged during the 1990's, she has gained an international reputation for provocative works that frequently employ coarse visual puns and a defiant, bawdy humour. Her works span the media of photography, collage and found objects. Sarah Lucas lives and works in London and is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and CFA Berlin.

Sarah Lucas studied art at The Working Men's College, London College of Printing and Goldsmith's College, graduating in 1987. She was included in the ground-breaking group exhibition Freeze the following year, along with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume. She emerged as one of the major Young British Artists during the 1990s, with a body of highly provocative work. In the early 1990's she began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning.

Sarah Lucas has challenged sexual stereotypes in a series of provocative self-portraits. She turns against the art-historical tradition of the female seductress or muse, and presents herself in a deliberately androgynous, and occasionally aggressive, series of poses. She adopts masculine gestures and stances, and shows herself in unisex clothing like jeans and T-shirts. These images also raise questions about the role and appearance of the modern artist. In contrast to the stereotype of the artist as an anguished male, Lucas shows herself as an ordinary person in emphatically ordinary surroundings.

Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were presciently titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. For six months in 1993, Sarah Lucas and fellow artist Tracey Emin rented a retail space in east London - "The Shop" - where they made artworks, ranging from printed mugs to T-shirts with slogans, and put them on sale.

Through her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphor to discuss sex, death, Englishness and gender.

In works such as Bitch (table, t-shirt, melons, vacuum-packed smoked fish - 1995), she merges low-life misogynist tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made, with the intention of confronting sexual stereotyping. As with earlier works in which she had displayed enlarged pages from the Sunday Sport newspaper, the intention was to attack stereotyping on its own ground, using a base language given critical viability by an affinity to previous movements such as Situationism and Surrealism.

Sarah Lucas is also known for her confrontational self-portraits, such as Human Toilet Revisited (1998; London, Tate), a colour photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition The Fag Show (London, Sadie Coles, 2000), she explored her obsession with cigarettes as a material for art, suggesting the connection between smoking and sexually obsessive activity. Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000 makes a connection between the obsessional, introverted activities of smoking and drawing.The morbidity and provocative nature of her work has often elicited comparisons with Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst; her androgynous occupation of this masculine low-life domain gives her work much of its critical character. In 1996 she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish.

'I first started smoking when I was nine. And I first started trying to make something out of cigarettes because I like to use relevant kind of materials. I've got these cigarettes around so why not use them. There is this obsessive activity of me sticking all these cigarettes on the sculptures, and obsessive activity could be viewed as a form of masturbation. It is a form of sex, it does come from the same sort of drive, And there's so much satisfaction in it. When you make something completely covered in cigarettes and see it as solid it looks incredibly busy and it's a bit like sperm or genes under the microscope.'

Sarah Lucas may not be the most talked about of the Young British Artists but she has always been one of the most important. At the beginning of the 90's, while women were trading shoulder pads for Wonderbras and cocktails for pints of lager, Sarah Lucas swapped feminist theory for Page Three.
Lucas challenged the street slang used to describe women by turning it into physical forms. She replaced anger and embarrassment with humour, portraying breasts as melons or fried eggs, catching public attention with hard-hitting sculpture and spreads from The Sun. In making physical representations of sexual slang and celebrating stories about rampant dwarves she moved the discussion further along then any amount of protest art.
Sarah Lucas is the “drinking man’s” Rachel Whiteread. Walking around her survey show at Tate Liverpool you can clearly make out the core materials and traditions of her art - concrete, cardboard, resin, steel and found objects; the cool, minimal associations of which are tinged with humour and sexual innuendo. Her use of animal carcasses, fish, fruit and veg rotting on top of these surfaces recalls still life's, while she pays homage to Duchamp with toilets and bicycles.

This is not a slick, ordered show and doesn’t offer a chronological overview of Lucas’ career, but it does demonstrate how good an artist she is. For example, within her sculptural compositions there are extremes between her use of materials (a chicken and bra stretched and tied to each end of a steel-sprung bed in Bondage Up Yours, 2000) but nothing is clumsy or unresolved. She knows exactly how much information to give, which angles suggest dominance or subservience, and how far apart or close objects should be to create or emphasize tensions out of otherwise inanimate items. And it’s interesting to observe her decisions about scale, with photographs ranging from A3 (Is Suicide Genetic? 1996) to billboard size (Complete Arsehole, 1993).

"In her art, Sarah Lucas does not mince her words, but she doesn't beat about the bush either", a critic once wrote about the work of the artist Sarah Lucas, born 1962 in London. This concisely describes what is essential in Sarah Lucas' artistic objects: a drastic, rude language and precise and concise formulations.
Sarah Lucas may be known to some Portikus visitors by her participation in the group exhibition "Karaoke (Football World Cup) - Georg Herold and guests" in July of 1994, where she showed her sculptures "Au Naturel" and "Bitch" for the first time. In this exhibition at Portikus - her first solo exhibition in Germany - there are also new works to be seen. Sarah Lucas creates rebellious objects from simple, everyday materials and objects such as fruits, discarded furniture, and found articles; objects that possess grotesque and macabre qualities that go beyond pure punch lines and are provocative in a persistent manner. For this, the artist utilises a medium that has a long subversive tradition: collage and assemblage. Sarah Lucas, who studied at Goldsmith's College in London and grew up in the rough working-class neighbourhoods in east London - where she still lives today - intensively investigates social clichés, especially in regard to gender roles and sexual identification. She is influenced and inspired by feminist theory, e.g. Andrea Dworkin's "Pornography" and "Intercourse", but still, it would not go far enough to define her work as "feminist" or "political".
Lucas' artistic approach is unambiguous; her assemblages and collages, however, are ambiguous. In a playful and carefree manner, the artist exposes the ambivalence of our associations and perceptual structures. "...very slight and casual, which I think is important to the work I do. My work is not laboured, it is like a play."

Sarah Lucas exhibited one of her most famous works, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, in 1992, in a shop in Soho. Every morning, she had to get up and buy a kebab, then fry the eggs, then arrange them carefully on a table. ' It seemed part of the installation,' she has said. ' It never crossed my mind that anyone would buy it.' Charles Saatchi, who did, has long been a Lucas fan and patron. So enormously successful has she become, the carefully posed eggs and melons, the fags and obscenely gesturing tits, the scowling self-portraits and titillating tabloids, have passed into YBA iconography as surely as Damien Hirst's cows and Tracey Emin's tent. For Lucas, the rush-of-blood moment, the sudden movement and making is the object. She can be equally headlong in her day-to-day life. She recently leapt on Damien Hirst in a crowded bar at the Groucho Club in Soho and wrestled him to the carpet. She said she was going to bite his tongue off and put it in his pocket and afterwards Hirst admitted that there was an instant when he thought she might do it.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Sarah Lucas Get Hold of This painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

Sarah Lucas Chicken Knickers Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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Homemade health and beauty products

Recipe, instructions and ingredients for homemade soap, sunburn relief, mouthwash, toothpaste and beauty powders.

It’s fun to make your own lotions, powders, bubble bath and facial preparations. Not only can you experiment with various formulas until you perfect one just to your liking, you can also choose your own beautiful jars and decanters. Discount stores are full of uniquely shaped bottles and other containers for storing your new creations. You can label the potions by printing cute stickers from your home printer or purchasing blank adhesive labels for writing.

You can get recipes for bath and body products online or in library books, or rework some of these to suit your taste. Here’s a few to get you started:

Soap:

Make your own soap flakes by saving small bars of used soap and after drying, slice into small slivers. When the soap begins getting small, wash the soap well and place on a paper towels. After most of the water is absorbed, place the soap in a breathable container with others until you have enough to use for making new soaps. You can also purchase soap flakes rather than use old bars.

Mix and simmer 1 cup of soap flakes, 1 tablespoon of glycerin and a quart of water until the flakes are dissolved. Pour into a jar and let cool. Adjust the consistency of the soap by adding more or less water. Add essential oils or soap fragrances, found at craft stores.

You can make soap with glycerin which is found in cakes at craft stores and melted in a pot. Add 8 to10 drops of essential oils to the melted glycerin, a drop or two of food coloring, then pour into molds.

Powder:

Arrowroot powder works great to give a feeling of dryness. Sprinkle essential oils into arrowroot powder. Mix well and allow to dry for a couple of days, covered. Mix again and put the powder through a flour sifter to break up any lumps.

A cup of cornstarch, four tablespoons each of arrowroot powder and baking soda is mixed together to make a very nice powder. If you want scent, add essential oils, let dry and sift.

Mouthwash:

Boil a cup of water. Remove from heat and add a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and parsley, along with a whole clove. Let the ingredients sit in the hot water for 15 minutes. Remove and strain, add a teaspoon of peppermint extract. Other extracts can be used instead of peppermint.

Toothpaste:

Mix one-half cup of bicarbonate of soda with one-sixth cup of salt. Add six teaspoons of glycerine and enough water to make a thick paste. Add several drops of peppermint extract or a different flavor to improve the taste.

Sunburn Relief:

Grow an aloe vera plant and keep it healthy. Should sunburn occur, break off a stalk and squeeze the juice onto the burn. Or use a half-cup of water with two teaspoons of vinegar to wipe on the sunburn. You can also pour a cup of raw oats into a warm bath. Soak for twenty to thirty minutes and pat dry. Or have a tea bath by dropping three to four tea bags in bath water