In 1979, two years before she ceased teaching at the art school, Lusk began a series of works based on buildings in Christchurch's central city that were being demolished in order to build office buildings and apartment blocks. She worked from photographs that she took and collaged with images culled from newspapers, and translated these into paintings made with watercolour, acrylic and coloured pencil. In a 1983 interview Lusk denied that the subject carried any psychological charge, saying that, "My work is really very practical, and it would be quite dishonest if I tried to put in psychological meanings […] The Demolition works were a little misunderstood. [People thought] that I became very fascinated with the factual destruction of buildings as a sort of sociological thing. But that was not true […] It was a visual image to hang my media painting on, that’s all."
