SUSTAINABLE ART
Featured Artist, Summer Exhibition 2022, Royal Academy of Arts
Sustainable art is art in harmony with the key principles of sustainability. That includes topics of ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. In recent years, Lukas gradually started shifting his focus on sustainability matters and issues and voicing his concerns and messages through artistic mediums. He has participated in projects and movements across the globe while working on his creative projects. His work which is being produced from recycled / environmentally friendly materials and printed with zero carbon emissions has been exhibited and showcased in many leading art institutions receiving the attention and appreciation it deserves.
Left Behind was selected out of 16 500 submitted artworks for the ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS SUMMER EXHIBITION 2022.
Digital Art Exhibition 2023, Social Impact Club, London Business School
PLASTIC HAPPINESS
Snowman Race, Bhutan and Enviromentalism
Rising concerns that so many activists become so negative in their approach, always hectoring and condemning, urged Lukas to bring beauty into the argument. In his series Plastic & Happiness, the images feature the beauty of plastic sparingly used alongside plastic waste due for recycling. It is an optimistic response to plastic pollution, awakening the realisation that we all can participate and make lifestyle changes which will have an impact on our imperilled world. The photographs were taken in Bhutan in 2022. During his visit, Lukas was moved by the lifestyle of the Bhutanese people and their commitment to happiness and sustainability. He got a chance to interview a Bhutanese runner and activist Tashi Chozom and gain a unique insight in the the culture of the beautiful country of Bhutan. Ever since, Lukas has been looking for opportunities to collaborate and share awareness about climate change through art and everyday activities - to demonstrate how creating and keeping new habits can greatly impact places, spaces and communities that will benefit and inspire others.
In November 2023, The UAL Sustainability Alumni Network recently held its second talk in the Sustainable Horizons series. The talks allow creative graduates from the University of the Arts London to share their knowledge on sustainability within their field. Lukas has been invited to share his journey into climate awareness in art, sharing with us his most recent artistic projects, which are 100% sustainable.
COLLABORATION WITH @areyoumad.co
In his passionate exploration of sustainable creative practises, Lukas partnered with James Suckling from @areyoumad.co, to create picture frames made of recycled plastic waste for his photographers taken in Bhutan. Waste material has been collected from businesses in Soho and formed into beautiful marble-like structures. Sleek, modern, contemporary cutting-edge frames for Lukas´s photographs and other artworks focused on specific areas of recycling, slow fashion, upcycling, reinventing and creating sustainable materials out of plastic as well as other forms of waste - and making these into beautiful and unique art forms or products.
Step by step - the journey of my frames: from the street waste to the game-changing education recycling space in Soho London, onto my dinner table for assembly and finally on the walls of the Chelsea Arts Club.
REDEMPTION
A collage of four original hand modified photographs on a recycled gold tray is connecting the spiritual - prayer flags, and the physical - recycle bins. The flags point to the sublime, the bins to what we reject. The 75x50cm collage titled 'Redemption' is framed in a mindfully sourced cherrywood.
Lukas took inspiration from the four pillars of Gross National Happiness in Bhutan.
1. Sustainable and Equitable Socio-Economic Development
2. Preservation and Promotion of Culture
3. Environmental Conservation
4. Good Governance
LOOKING TO BE SAFE AND SOUND
Lukas´s “Looking to be Safe and Sound” visual emergency guide is inspired by the critical situation of the Covid pandemic and drew on PROTECT AND SURVIVE: a booklet prepared for the Home Office by the Central Office of Information in 1980, aimed at the general public describing "how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack."
Lukas worked in the challenging context of war and instability. Lukas has always been looking for places and spaces where he had felt safe and sound. He styled, make-uped and photographed his fashion model to fit his own safe and familiar space, as recommended by the emergency booklet.
Featured in the CURATED PHOTOGRAPHY GROUP SHOW at the Chelsea Arts Club.
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LUKAS AND HIS CREATIVE JOURNEY
This is the beginning of my creative journey. The image is an early assignment from my foundation year University of the Arts London. I had never attempted a self-portrait for life drawing before. I want to be experimental: I saw it as playtime, giving myself red lips, and making and creating a collage with a photo of my eye. I captured myself at that moment, very uncertain about my identity. I never shared this image with anyone, and I never did any more drawings. At the time, I felt it was just play and far from the idealised images I wanted to create. But now, I see it as an inspiration.
Self-portrait: collage with drawing
This image shows one of my best works as a craftsperson in specialist hair and make-up design, with photography. I was and remain very proud of it. It launched me into the first phase of my career. One of my University of the Arts London teachers introduced me to Hardy Amies and drew me into fashion shows; I was recruited into Moda’s Touch where I worked styling celebrities and organising photoshoots. In turn, that took me into the events business, organising extraordinary parties for socialites. At the time, I very much liked the appealing celebrity names and the buzz. But I was feeling more and more like an entertainer and increasingly feared losing my creativity.
The Line of Beauty: University of the Arts London BA Show at the Royal Academy, also exhibited at Unilever
The London Season’s Debutantes Preparing for the Ball was published in Bild and Hello magazine
This image of mine shows my work with these and other young women in the revival of a traditional British social scene as a Creative Director. I designed the makeup, styling, and choreography and managed the production team giving coaching as necessary. I sourced fantastic venues, such as Kensington Palace and Highclere Castle and had great press coverage, with one of my debutantes being featured on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, for example. But increasingly I found a disturbing aspect to this, partly in the snobbery which was foreign to me as someone from the Czech Republic, and also in the pretence. I wanted to help these young women – and me – become much more who they really were.
Emilia
As this stage of my career developed, I kept on playing, although I never saw these fun, experimental images as art. The first of this pair of images is my close friend from the London College of Fashion. During our studies, we had such a great time pushing boundaries. We had explored Mme Yevonde’s Goddesses: Emilia so much wanted to be Medusa and that is what I made her. The image combines make-up and hair styling, the shoot itself and extensive Photoshop work. It was such a laugh. Looking back, it was fun like this that was keeping some of my original creative inspiration alive.
Peggy in the Royal Box at the Royal Opera House: permanent display at the London Business School
This is my best portrait from before the lockdown. I created this image of Peggy, a leading businesswoman, to mark her appointment to the Board of the Royal Opera House. It shows my ability and good luck in securing great locations: we were given just 20 minutes for this shoot between rehearsals and the public opening. But it also shows how I can capture the mood, coming from the experiments I had kept alive. It conveys the power and status of a successful older woman. It also conveys the loneliness and lack of personal space that goes with power.
Lockdown inspiration: pebbles and buoys
My lockdown was in a remote corner of the Isle of Skye, without work or company other than my partner. Suffering from anxieties, I walked up and down stony beaches and learned to lose myself in the space and sound of the sea. I began to delight in pebbles, looking for the perfect smooth shape, being surprised by shapes I hadn’t imagined. I framed them in my mind and then my camera, without feeling that I had to produce a product: a breakthrough for me. I shared some with a friend by post: the stamp, the frank from the local postmaster and the imagined journey completed the work. I found old metal fishing buoys. I brought these onto land, placed them together and set them in a small pond, and this installation would change shape and colour with the seasons. Before, I would have dismissed it as trivia. Now I wondered what it meant. It led to everything I have done since.
Left Behind
During lockdown, I browsed through my photos I had never taken further. Climate change was much on my mind and so this image struck me. It was also prompted by my installation of metal buoys. It shows thrown-away plastic containers, repurposed to become floats for a coastal community’s fish farm in Brazil, from a project visit we had made. It stood out like the pebbles I had been selecting, for its pleasing colour balance and mysterious quality. Initially, I wondered what it was and couldn’t place it, and I nearly rejected this image as I saw it as insufficiently sharp, but its indistinctness added to the mystery. It gave me a feeling of contentedness, hope and completion. Several friends said that I must enter it into the Royal Academy Summer's awareness of climate change and the need for action. For me, this was simply about helping people find meaning in throwing away objects and finding magic in resources that we might just otherwise consume and leave behind. I was delighted to find that it inspired other people, including the curators of the Royal Academy, who chose it from among 16,500 submissions for the 2022 Summer Show.
Monika
Here is an example of the fun arrangements that I make and unmake frequently and would never have dreamed of including in an art submission. But I love the arrangement for itself, and the doll Monika holds the key to the way I now work with people. She was given to me as a nine-year-old by my dad on his return from a work trip to the old East Germany. Ever since she has been a presence as I oppress her, do her hair and create environments for her. She is not particularly pretty and has a slightly disapproving look. But she has power. This arrangement was prompted by an unknown friend sending me the chicken, egg and message in the post. I felt surprised, laughed a lot and wanted to add my wit to it in a kind of conversation. I placed it on a shelf with a cat that was blissfully ignoring the affair, with Monika outraged at the invasion of her space. She opened the door for my work with people after the lockdown, in further portraits that were part of installations.
Being Safe and Sound I
This image, exhibited at the Chelsea Arts Club in 2022, is of my friend Elsa from Latvia. It was inspired by our fear of war and the Cold War booklet “Protect and Survive” discovery. Her family and mine have good reason to fear the Russians: she has now left the UK to help her country. The British booklet advised people to hide with a 14-day supply of necessities. But this is not horrified anxiety so much as fear of the unknown, and I have amassed around her comforting objects. These take many shapes and colours with a lovely balance, which I am beginning to recognise as my post-pandemic signature style, which you can also see in the work previously described, “Left Behind".
Being Safe and Sound II
Also exhibited at the Chelsea Arts Club in 2022 is this second image of Elsa. It continues its theme, adopting the British government's advice of sheltering under the staircase at home in case of an air attack. Here, the black metal stairs are like a cage. Her white dress contrasts starkly and has a sacrificial look. It is her best dress. My grandmother told me that women always took their best clothes to the air raid shelter, as the rest of the wardrobe might well be destroyed. But this is not just a didactic, dramatic piece to raise awareness of war. The positioning of the stairs and the colour balance grab the attention independently of the storyline, and the image conveys a particular kind of fear: the boredom of waiting for what happens next.
Karmel's First Day at Work
Karmel returns to work after the lockdown, getting ready for her first day at her new job as a beauty consultant in London’s West End. She told me that she wanted to impress with my professional styling, but at the same time, I know that she is nervous about leaving furlough and moving into a largely white working environment. Around her are much loved objects which I helped her choose both for comfort and the colour balance. I love this piece of work as one of the best examples of my signature style but do not want to be trapped by it.
Sheila at Ascot for Ladies' Day 2022
I was taken to the Ascot Races to style a client. When the client left, I wandered around checking people out, even spotting the Princess Royal. Then I got lost. And I met Sheila, one of the staff there to organise the crowd. She asked if I needed assistance and we chatted about her work in the hot weather, directing so many people. She struck me as so committed and purposeful where other people, much grander, were running about pointlessly. I saw that she owned her place and her ground, and although in a role that many might regard as subordinate in her uniform, she was the most powerful. In the image, a lot is going on, but she is the still, strong figure amid mayhem. She makes you stop and think. Again, the colour balance matches my signature style with the bold contrasts, but with the relief of not having to organise the environment. This picture is also a breakthrough for me: before the pandemic, I would have tried to sneak a photo of Princess Royal.
Laura at the London Craft Fair
Laura is our neighbour on the Isle of Skye and an award-winning bookbinder. Here she is part of a celebration of craft in London, sponsored by Wallpaper Magazine. Before I made this image, I styled her and coached her, much as I did those much younger debutantes in the earlier phase of my career before the pandemic. Here, I framed the image so that her craft talks first, as she wanted. Laura told me that she is uncomfortable with public speaking, and always wants her work to do the talking. And so powerful objects balance this powerful woman. This is not just me fulfilling her wishes. It is my installation. Arranging her and the objects shown here in a different way would lose the meaning: we would only see an elderly woman, some books, and some words in the background. But I have brought them together, making connections, like the floats in my work “Left Behind”.
Transformation
My photograph "Transformation" a pile of collected plastic after the Snowman Race as a colour negative to demonstrate the positive outcome of recycling.Printed in London in Printspace, the UK’s first Fine Art & Photo printing service that is completely carbon neutral and is presented in my frame design, handmade in London out of recycled plastic collected on the streets of Soho. Here is an example from my collaboration with James Suckling from @areyoumad.co, creating beautiful marble-like structures and picture frames. They are sleek, modern, contemporary cutting-edge frames for my photographs and other artworks focused on specific areas of recycling, slow fashion, upcycling, reinventing and creating sustainable materials out of plastic as well as other forms of waste and making these into beautiful and unique art forms or products.
