Having risen to fame as one of the Young British Artists of the 1990s, Sarah Lucas is renowned for a provocative aesthetic that positions her at the forefront of contemporary artistic discourse on gender and social politics. At once individual and universal, Toilet Elevation addresses popular culture through the lens of art history - in a combination of 'low' and 'elevated' references - in order to present the viewer with a psychological commentary that resonates with Lucas’ wider oeuvre. Determinedly relevant, Lucas was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2013, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Loaded with sexuality, politics and humour, the present spirited sculpture synthesises her wry explorations of materiality and the body.

Lucas’ characteristically playful vernacular incorporates ceramics into Toilet Elevation in the form of a latrine. Removed from its habitual context and placed at the core of the composition, the toilet draws on an established theme in twentieth-century art history, an object exploited by artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, 1917, one of the most recognisable of Duchamp’s readymades, consists of a urinal, signed and dated by the artist’s alter-ego, ‘R. Mutt’. Elevating ordinary items and transforming them within her work, Lucas finds potential in the everyday and the innocuous, stating, ‘Things acquire, accrue a kind of powerfulness to them’ (Sarah Lucas, quoted in ‘Sarah Lucas with William Corwin’, The Brooklyn Rail, 5 September 2011, online).

Throughout her controversial output, Lucas has revisited the toilet as an object and a symbol, allowing it to function as a reminder of mortality, fertility and clichéd attitudes towards the female body, whether in art or popular culture. Lucas has, for example, incorporated the pedestrian object in her photograph Is Suicide Genetic?, 1996, her self-portrait Human Toilet Revisited, 1998, the series of polyurethane casts The Old in Out, 1998, and more recently in her prominent installation I Scream Daddio at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In Venice, the artist filled custard-yellow rooms with sculptures in which plaster casts of legs, taken from nine female models, were combined with toilets or items of furniture, projecting questions about the reclining female nude, the latent symbolism of inanimate furniture and the power of the fragment. Musing on her concern with the domestic and utilitarian ceramic object, Lucas notes 'I’ve done many toilet pieces – including photographs of myself on the toilet. Generally I’ve used old toilets for their grubby value. It was nice to make ones that look quite smart – like antidotes. I like the idea of something uncouth being elegant’ (Sarah Lucas, quoted in ‘Close Encounters of the Art Kind’, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001, online).

In Toilet Elevation, the anthropomorphic sculpture is a rudimentary representation of a headless female figure constructed out of quotidian objects. Reminiscent of Lucas’ infamous Bunny works of 1997, Toilet Elevation incorporates stuffed stockings stretched around a concrete block to form a headless corporeal structure. Each Bunny, modelled to represent the torso and legs of the female body, is affixed to a chair, whereas in the present work, the suggested female torso is placed onto a toilet bowl atop an altar-like table. A latrine forms the 'waist' of the figure while the simple Modernist table implies squarely-planted legs, with the breast-like forms of the stuffed tights culminating the stack of readymade parts. Elevating the importance of the toilet, and equating it to the human form, Lucas exposes the vulnerability and physicality of the human body. Praising the utilitarian object, Lucas has remarked: ‘Toilets are unsung heroes of our hygienic lives. Why don’t we celebrate them? It’s fascinating that the water goes round and round the system, gets cleaned and comes back round. There are contraceptives in the water so women get infertile... quite shocking things. We live with a level of impurity. It’s one thing I like about not bothering to make anything perfectly. It’s partly making things easy for myself but if you don’t live with imperfections you get stuck on one thing. Nothing is pure. Everything you do doesn’t go away. Some trace is there’ (Sarah Lucas, quoted in ‘Close Encounters of the Art Kind’, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001, online).