What are you afraid of?
Video Installation, 2004.
Upstairs Gallery, The City Gallery, Leicester

Lucy Stevens’ exhibition What are you afraid of? explores the emotion of fear and the way in which we react to it. This video installation piece addresses the emotion, fear and our individual response to it. Stevens uses a bed to represent a comfort zone that many of us can identify with, evoking childhood memories as a place to hide in or escape into, through the fear of being caught. Visitors will be drawn towards a light emanating from beneath the bed, beneath, which the artist can be seen cowering from an unknown entity.

The installation toys with the human instinct to look at what shocks and intrigues us. Set in a darkened room, the installation beckons visitors to come in and engage with what is under the bed. Exploring ideas of the intruder, the voyeur and the escapist, by projecting Stevens’ angst onto the viewer.

Stevens was inspired by her own feelings of fear that arose through moving away to university ‘I had a habit of checking under my bed, in my wardrobe and my windowsill, just to see if anybody was hiding there’. When one of my flatmates asked ‘What would you do if someone was hiding under your bed?’

Press Release by Andrea Colver,
The City Gallery, Leicester, 2004.