In Lucy Dodd's paintings, planets run into each other. Or that’s what it looks like. Large orbs of vibrant color skate across bare canvas, occasionally colliding—and bursts of streaked acrylic accompany their rupture. Sometimes the sky flips: in “Heart Racing” (2021), a child’s footsteps walk across the canvas, rendered in an otherworldly indigo blue. The results, though, always feel redolent with Dodd’s emotive view, a gaze that transforms banal materials into painterly fundament. A kid’s eager disruption becomes a Twombly-like gesture, a greedy Scottish weed (woad, most recently), an opportunity to coax new blood—or pastel—from an old stone.

It has not been an easy path: Dodd traversed America in recent years, from LA to New York, and now, to “the north coast of Scotland,” where she’s hard at work on the paintings for her next exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Berlin this spring. “It’s a move for many reasons,” she explains to me. “But a lot to do with just needing a new land to connect with, which is part of my matriarchal lineage. I’m going back to where my roots are.”

Behind her, I can see the edge of a new work on paper, streaked with blue paint. It is hung—just before our call, she says—above a small couch bursting with pillows. It doesn’t look like the living room of astrologers I’m used to (read: fold- out tables on The Venice Beach Boardwalk), but her move has, indeed, been vetted by the stars. “I’m deeply into astrology,” she says. “I’ve been tracking the Pluto ingress into Aquarius.”

At the beginning of our conversation, I know only that I am a Gemini sun. I can’t remember if my rising sign is Scorpio or Sagittarius, only that people act frightened when I tell them it’s the former. Dodd, though, is an astrology veteran, using the esoteric belief system to inform both her life and her work. “I just believe: ‘As above, so below,’” she explains. “Everything is connected and especially the energy of the planets and the stars.”

As for Pluto’s movement from Capricorn to Aquarius? Here’s a brief primer, courtesy of Dodd. It will “bring in a whole new way of living onto our planet.” It’s “the underbelly of everything.” Pluto is “death and rebirth.” Capricorn is “climbing up that mountain, getting to the top, really earthy.” Aquarius is “crazy air.” It is “a very futuristic sign,” she tells me. “Humongous jumps in technology, for better or worse.” It is, in two words, “so transformational.”

Luckily, Dodd’s art practice is uniquely amenable—and even dependent on—a change in environment, whether planetary or otherwise. And so far, so good: “Scotland is amazing,” she says eagerly. “The air is different and the germs are different. The colors are different. The light is completely different. We’re so far north that the sun is never overhead. The plants are different. It’s just a humongous adjustment.”

Where other painters will begin with Photoshop sketches or images culled from the internet, Dodd’s muse is more organic. She turns to the ingredients that surround her, experimenting with their color to form the basis of her paintings. In Scotland, this means investigating local flora—and even growing them herself. “The first plant that I decided to work with was woad,” she says. “It’s kind of like the UK version of Indigo. If it’s extracted correctly, you can get beautiful hues of blue. For me it represents freedom because the Picts used it. They painted their face with it as an intimidation tactic against the British. They used woad to fight for their independence. So, I thought, that’s going to be my starting point to make this leap. To leave America and use woad.”

Each material Dodd utilizes has a rich history, often signifying meanings that reverberate across the artist’s life. But they’re practical, too—and are often a way of integrating her children into her working life. “I always start with things that are directly connected to me and my body, or what I’m eating, or what the kids are eating, or what we can all do together,” she says. “The beginning is extremely fluid. Just me and the kids playing with nontoxic materials.”

As if on cue, Dodd’s kids emerge. She leaves to help them, then returns, assuring me that they should be okay now. The interruption reflects a broader trajectory for the artist: she appears to seamlessly integrate even the most quotidian aspects of parenthood into her work. “Everything changed when I had kids,” Dodd says. “I was open to seeing what would happen with that. In the beginning I would smear their dirty diapers on the canvases and get that crazy yellow poo color.”

(Apparently, the yellow turns white in the sun, so owners of this work may not be able to tell its nastier origins.)

Does she control the results? “I would say I try to control it as little as possible,” she explains. “But it’s hard to do. I do intervene and I don’t. It’s only maybe 10 to 15 minutes that they’re with me; it’s not like they’re making the paintings with me for a while. And I made these paintings outside. It rains, you know. I wasn’t controlling that. There are cats walking across the painting, there are birds pooping on it. After that I work on shaping them, finishing them, adding things.”

It’s a far cry from the isolated studio most (more conventional) artists find necessary for their practice, but it works for Dodd. “There’s no other way to work without including what is actually happening around me,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be truthful. In this little bubble of a world of being a mom and being a painter, it’s what comes natural.”

Whether she is using woad, the Scottish weed gorse, or children’s diapers, her abstract paintings become an archive of the materials that surround her.The potentially repulsive qualities of these compositional tools are exactly the point: the sparse beauty of Dodd’s work is in constant tension—or harmony—with its chemical makeup. “For me,” Dodd explains, “it’s really just an investigation about what’s around me and what we’re fearful of. We’re part of nature. Nature is us. And stuff happens, you know? It’s not like they’re desserts. They’re paintings.”

Not desserts, but paintings—a belief that some gallerists, prioritizing collectors’ living rooms over curious artistic impulses, might be eager to dissuade her from. And they did: a couple of years back Dodd left her New York dealer, David Lewis Gallery, and sold her studio. “In New York I felt that I was embodying a male version of myself,” she says. “It was how I had to adapt. At my age, a lot of women who are successful learn how to embody their male energy. So, when I moved, I got rid of my 5,000-square-foot studio. I left my gallery in New York. It was killing me.”

It hasn’t come without its challenges, though. “I can still feel that I have this New York anxiety,” she tells me. “Giving up my studio was the hardest part of disconnecting from that mindset. Now I’m just working outside. I have to work when it’s in tune with the season.”

Whether or not the art world will be amenable to her new practice remains to be seen, though I sense that Dodd’s singular vision will readily cut through the industrial demands of unadaptable dealers. It’s in the stars, right? “I’ve been thinking about this Aquarian age and the potential for connection,” she says. “I decided to go deep into my own rebirthing. One of the paintings that I already sent to the gallery is called ‘Activate Galactic Origin.’”

Ultimately, Dodd says, her process is “in a healing place...it’s just about being gentler. It’s about understanding that we’re part of something, the stars, the astrology. That’s what can be possible. You’ve got to understand astrology in order to do anything.”

Dodd is persuasive. By the end of our conversation, I tell the artist that I wish I could have my galactic origin activated during Pluto’s transit to Aquarius. What can I say? I’m a Gen- Z-Millennial cusp; I love a hermeneutic. According to Dodd, because I saw her 2022 show at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, my energy has already been transformed. I’d love to go to Berlin, though, just to be really sure—is there a ruling planet for arts and entertainment journalism?