LUCY SOMERS

Lucy Somers was born into a family of painters and was surrounded by art from a very young age. She found support and encouragement from Joan Weston, then teacher at Dover Girls Grammar School, awarded the Philomena Kennedy award, a local fund supporting creative excellence and encouraged to begin exhibiting as part of her practise.

Her first exhibition at 16 years old, showed her work alongside her mother Penny Bearman's work and her grandmother Margaret Peters' work.

At college Lucy was greatly influenced by painting tutor Ian Bottle and their shared interest in abstract treatments of figurative subjects.

 

Once at university, Lucy was introduced to Relational Aesthetics, the core theory which had been driving installation and interactive artwork since the 1980's, and set to making sense of this theory in the context of painting. Working with her university tutor John Byrne gave Lucy the opportunity to take part in the Athens Biennial in 2012: Monodrome, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud a prominent theorist and author of Relational Aesthetics.

 

The work encountered and produced in Athens inspired a new decicive sparcity in her work, and led to the large installation pieced such as "Line Describing A Table" 2012. Questions of the theatricality of the Still Life gave way to a new materiality. Texture and scale became the questions, using materials such as wicker, carpet within outsized paintings.

 

Lucy's work developed further through contact with MA tutors Imogen Stidworthy and Rosalind Nashashibi, who were instrumental in Lucy's practise broadening into installation work alongside painting, and developing this sustainably, integrating this into the language of colour already developed in the painting practice. The duality of having an installation practice running concurrently to a painting practice has proven highly productive, and also mirrors itself in the later split between figurative and abstract painting. 

 

In 2014 a collaborative project with New York artist Hisachika Takahashi broadened Somers' focus on surface materiality with pattern. The 2014 collaboration used UV illumination to create volume-less depth-less woven layers of pattern. This development became deeply linked to the object-portraits created over the next few years.

 

Somers' work continues to use observation to anchor her work to definable scales; interlocking the texture of real objects with the scale-less pattern to create surreal moments of discintegration.

​

Outside exhibitions, her work can be viewed on request in Deal Brighton and London, UK.