In EGG: Sarah Lucas & 750 eggs (2019-2023) we follow the artist as she prepares change into exact amounts and denominations, before arriving at a remote countryside farm to buy eggs from a vending machine. Onward to an unattended road-side stall with an honesty box for payment, 750 eggs are procured in total and driven home through the crisp December weather. Over the course of the festive period, from Christmas to New Year’s Eve, we see documentation of various rituals, performances and convivialities involving the eggs. On Christmas morning we see Lucas, with friends and family, conduct a traditional egg dance – a grid of eggs, laid out in the grass, at two and a half feet intervals are skilfully avoided by the dancers as they move up and down the line.

The film is a visual document of a series of events but is also constitutive of a particular feeling not usually associated with Lucas’s work. The film engenders a folk sensibility. We hear and see local musicians in country pubs playing traditional instruments and singing, and we hear extended experimental overtures on violin throughout. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of Lucas herself idly playing the violin, held in unconventional orientations, producing evocative drones. We see a naked body being communally covered in egg yolk while lying on a table in a large farmhouse kitchen. We see eggs being used, unbroken, to draw phallic outlines on coastal rocks. We see eggs being thrown into miniature architectural models of gallery spaces to produce giant spills of raw whites and yolks. We get closer to the work we know and yet somehow it is newly imbibed with a sense of the ritualistic and ceremonial. Eggs have always featured in Lucas’s work. In the past, she has said ‘Eggs are relevant to women …and they are finite. They’re not like sperm, you can’t just endlessly wank and spurt them everywhere. So, it’s kind of about futility, not just women’s futility, but futility in the world’. This film lends pathos to this concept. It invites deeper consideration of this idea. Eggs are to be understood as a symbol of ongoing life and paradoxically, as a contemplation of its finitude.