Artist Statement
Lucy Stevens is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose work explores the complex and evolving relationship between humans and the natural world. Through colour-coded mixed media, she creates vibrant paintings, sculpture, installation, and sound works for gallery, museum, and festival contexts.
Central to Stevens’ practice is research and collaboration. She works closely with scientists, ornithologists, museum curators and photographers to deepen her understanding of ecological systems, conservation data, and museum collections. Drawing on birdsong, specimen archives and field research accessed through bird ringing groups, birdwatching societies, and conservation charities, she translates scientific information into abstract visual languages.
Her recent solo exhibition Teeth (2025–2026), created in collaboration with Creswell Crags, responds to the site’s mammal tooth collection. Working closely with the museum team, Stevens examined both extant and extinct species — including the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth — to explore how teeth reveal diet, habitat, behaviour, and survival. The resulting paintings feature abstracted species forms within imagined habitats, where the silhouette of a tooth becomes both boundary and migratory pathway. Symbolic motifs such as eyes and moons suggest protection, change and cyclical time, positioning extinction, and survival within a wider ecological narrative.
Her first museum solo exhibition, Colour Coded Birds (2022–2023), was developed with Leicester Museum & Art Gallery. The project explored alternative methods of cataloguing British bird skin specimens through colour grouping rather than taxonomy. Bird skins from the collection were displayed alongside Stevens’ paintings, totemic wooden sculptures and photographic works layered with her instinctive mark-making. Sculptural forms incorporating eggs from the museum’s collection translated ornithological data into bold, chromatic structures, reimagining scientific classification as a sensory and visual experience.
In Chasing Seasons (2021), created in partnership with the British Trust for Ornithology and Leicestershire & Rutland Wildlife Trust, Stevens examined the impact of climate change on migratory birds. Using research data on population decline and altered migration patterns, she produced a series of mixed media works that visualised environmental disruption through shifting colour systems and fragmented forms.
Stevens lives and works in Leicester. She holds a BA (Hons) and MA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University. Her work has been exhibited widely across the East Midlands and London, and she has undertaken artist residencies in London, Scotland, Brussels, France, and Sweden.
Read Lucy’s Artist Biography and Artist CV.
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