Lou Hubbard's practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and the moving image to interrogate the nature of training, submission and subordination. Basic materials of domestic and institutional utility—very often personal objects—are tried and tested, then shaped into formal relationships. Objects are subjected to various modes of control and duress through which they must submit to her rules, and emotional resonances are drawn out through careful selection and placement of these found and readily-at-hand materials.
Sometimes Hubbard captures her operations on film; sometimes the resultant videos are projected in relationship to sculptural elements and on other occasions the sculptures—fitted, measured and precariously balanced—simply have an outing on their own. She uses a combination of rudimentary and refined approaches in her practice, refusing any tendency toward embellishment or artifice; the ultimate effect of her works might be perversely humorous or strangely sentimental.
Apart from the urge to make things perform, Hubbard betrays a love of dissonance and enigma. If her installations turn on irrepressible forms of symbolic violence, they are simultaneously undercut with a mantle of humour... Cartoonish figures and kitsch bibelots curtail the various scenarios of cruelty, imbuing them with an unexpected levity, another statement of the works’ discordant tensions.
Sophie Knezic, Frieze magazine, May 2015.