BIO
Lucy Pass is a self-taught contemporary figurative painter, currently living and working in Cheltenham, UK. Her appearance on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2019 sparked a move away from traditional portraiture, driving her to intensively explore and expand her practice over the following years. As a result her work is now in private collections all over the world and she has exhibited alongside renowned artists both across the UK and internationally. Her work has been shortlisted for several prestigious awards and she was announced as the overall winner of both The British Art Prize in 2023 and The Guildford House Open in 2024.
STATEMENT
The aim of my work is to capture the invisible things within us; to give a physical shape to the endless internal soup of human emotion. Half formed faces and human fragments hang in space, punctuated by a language of expressive marks and shapes – It’s unclear whether things are falling apart or piecing themselves together. The viewer is invited into a conversation between chaos and clarity, beauty and unease.
What I create on any given day is entirely mood dependent; Sometimes there's a clear idea, sometimes it’s purely driven by creative flow and meaning reveals itself later; sometimes it's okay to not fully understand it at all. Often the meaning changes and evolves with me alongside my lived experiences. It feels like a kind of therapy: feeling my way through and giving those feelings a visible form.
My paintings are highly introspective, but I have an endless fascination with how my work is read by others, so I try to offer it up without forced or rigid narratives, giving the viewer freedom to explore on their own terms with the aim of sparking inward curiosity. I can only ever truly know my own experience, but it is not the only one – I see my work as an outstretched hand, hoping to find connection and mutual understanding in an infinitely confusing world.