Sophie Huckfield’s fellowship will explore the legacy and potential future applications of Nobel Prize nominated Lucas Plan (1976), which aimed to repurpose engineers’ and workers’ technical skills for “socially useful production” but was never realised. In order to explore the legacy, methodologies and future applications of the Lucas Plan, the fellowship will work towards the co-creation of a ‘post-rational’ alternative world(s) building project, to collectively envision an alternative timeline of pasts and presents in which the Lucas Plan had been put in practice and envisioning that development if it had moved towards intersectional queer, feminist and ecological forms of repurposing skills and knowledge. The aim of this approach is to explore how our skills, knowledge and technological development can become more open, intersectional and democratic, alongside developing methodologies for how to collectively repurpose or reorient a range of infrastructures, tools and skills for equitable presents and futures, which takes a non-hierarchical and bottom up approach.
The action-based research will centre around connecting and collaborating with various publics at Kingston and beyond, with the aim to co-create new proposals inspired by the Lucas Plan’s 150 designs. The project will envision new intersectional social and environmental repurposing methodologies, expand upon what ‘socially useful’, and repurpose a range of infrastructures, perspectives and experiences.
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Sophie Huckfield is a research-based artist, designer and writer. Their practice is collaborative, political and interdisciplinary, and developed through intersectional feminist and queer practices, particularly in relation to working class lives. Their work draws on archival and research materials and it is concerned with reframing overlooked histories, connected with labour, technology, craft, class, and (de)industrialisation.
Recent projects include Lady Ludd, a feminist and queer reframing of the Luddite Movement as part of the Near Now Fellowship at Broadway in Nottingham; and OUTWORK, a collaborative project and book on the history of women Printworkers in West Bromwich with arts organisation Multistory and funded by Historic England. Previously they have exhibited, performed and screened at The Barbican, The Design Museum, Dutch Design Week, London Design Festival, Fashion Space Gallery, Two Queens, Vivid Projects, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Modern Clay, Eastside Projects amongst others, alongside commissioned projects for British Art Show 9 Partner Schools programme with Arts Connect and Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery.