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Lucy Cat (b. 2018)
Portal Fantasy [The Only Way Out Is Through], 2019
Stuffed lizard toy, toilet paper tube

In this atypically linear piece, the artist expresses her own life-long love of crawling halfway into cave-like structures and then staying there with her hindquarters sticking out, like a Pevensie child who is content to merely obstruct the wardrobe. Simultaneously, she reimagines herself as one of her own cat toys. The piece invites the viewer to peer around to the other end and look the lizard in the eye, but it is (deliberately?) arranged near furniture so there is not enough space for a human viewer to do so.

It was an extra special cat action kitchen tonight. The litter box is in the corner, and as I was leaving the kitchen I saw both cats try to step into it at once. I was like "If you can work it out, why not, I guess." Then while sitting in the living room I heard a weird combination of different loud noises, and both cats shot out into the hall and skidded around the corner, with Mina's tail fluffed up bigger than I've ever seen.

I found a lot of chaos in there and I finally figured out what happened. They have a habit of starting to dig in the litter but then reaching out of the box (which doesn't have a roof) and "digging" on whatever's nearby, like the wall or a bag of cat food. And there was a folding stepstool leaned up against the wall near that corner. I think both cats were in the pan and they reached out so far that they pulled that stepstool over. So what I heard was the stepstool falling and hitting the cat pan, the cat pan skidding over into the side of the stove, cats exploding out of the pan and a big spray of cat litter hitting the floor. If only I'd had a video camera on in there, I would've finally had my moment of fame on the Internet.