Teeth

A vibrant exhibition of colourful mixed media paintings inspired by the mammal teeth collection at Creswell Crags.

Preview evening: Saturday 11 October 2025, 10am - 1pm

Sunday 12 October 2025 – Sunday 28 June 2026 at Creswell Crags, Crags Rd, Creswell, Worksop S80 3LH.

In her second solo museum exhibition, Lucy Stevens presents a series of new works commissioned by Creswell Crags, compromising eight new mixed media paintings on canvas.

Based in Leicester, Lucy's work explores our relationship to the natural world, often drawing inspiration from ornithology, museum collections and her own experiences in nature. She has developed a practice using colour coded mixed media, photography, sound, sculpture and installation to interpret the natural environment. She often interprets species colouring, pattern, habitat, behaviour and vocalisations into vibrant portraits, colour charts and abstracts.

Lucy was awarded a solo show at Creswell Crags for her artwork 'Rainbow Lorikeet (Golden Sun)' as part of The Harley Gallery Open 2024. 

The award presented a rare opportunity to explore the collection, working alongside curator Angharad Jones. Lucy chose to work with a selection of mammal teeth, which she extensively researched to learn more about each species' habitat and lifestyle to inspire a new body of artwork using acrylic paint, collage, pencil and wax pastel on canvas.

She selected mammal teeth from the collection at Creswell Crags due to their unique characteristics and links to both living and extinct mammals.

The new work is an interpretation of the mammal teeth collection housed at Creswell Crags, including teeth found on-site at Pin Hole and Robin Hood Cave. Lucy has selected some well-known mammals from the collection of nearly 38,000 objects including reindeer, wolf, horse, bear, hyena, vole along with extinct mammals like the woolly rhino and woolly mammoth. 

This collection of new paintings uses mixed media to explore colour coding techniques to identify and interpret mammal teeth by looking at the number of different teeth each species has, including, canine, incisor, molar and premolar teeth.

In some of the paintings, the shape of teeth are used to showcase groups of mammals feeding, hunting or migrating, or stacked to form totems or boundaries between symbolic imagery of eyes and moons, representing the idea of protection, magic, change and the cycle of life.

The largest painting in the exhibition is a piece entitled ‘The Vole Clock’. This piece is inspired by a scientific method used for dating fossils (primarily from the last million years) using the size and evolutionary changes in the teeth of vole species, similar to how a clock tracks time. In this work Lucy has focused on the replacement of the now extinct Mimomys water vole which had rooted teeth by the Arvicola water vole which has unrooted teeth across 600,000 years of evolution.

Visitors are encouraged to explore the paintings and develop their own interpretations of each piece. The exhibition also includes photographs and a video documentary showcasing the journey of the project including Lucy in her art studio and exploring the collections in the storeroom with curator Angharad Jones at Creswell Crags.