2nd Place Winner

Lucy Bishop is a textile designer studying at the Royal College of Art, originally from Cheddar in Somerset. Through mixed media, embroidery and use of alternative materials, she hopes to show the fragile beauty in vulnerability and subtleties of life and nature, often overlooked or under-appreciated.

Inspired by the curious relationship between love and the abject, Lucy’s multi-layered compositions draw on narratives which unite memory with landscape, seeking links between light blemished clouds, bruised skies and skin, wounded or wrinkled. Visually decoding her own poetry describing an unprovoked knife crime, she explores physical and metaphorical scars in nature, material memory and fabric as skin.

Originally from Somerset, her imagery is guided by the area of Cheddar Gorge, a literal scar on the landscape, and the surrounding Mendip Hills. Exploring the delicate balance between desire and repugnance, her work hopes to transform subjects viewed as uncomfortable or of temporal beauty to challenge notions of perfection.

Inspired by the curious relationship between love and the abject, Lucy’s multi-layered compositions draw on narratives which unite landscape and body, seeking links between light blemished clouds, bruised skies and skin, wounded or wrinkled. The abject describes anything conventionally undesirable, extremely fragile or on the edge of non-existence. Lucy hopes to transform subjects viewed as uncomfortable or of temporal beauty to challenge notions of perfection.

Her textile pieces visually decode her own poetry, describing a period of healing following an unprovoked knife crime. Through mixed media, digital embroidery and use of alternative materials, she explores physical and metaphorical scars in nature, material memory and fabric as skin. Originally from Somerset, her imagery is guided by the area of Cheddar Gorge, a literal scar on the landscape, and the surrounding Mendip Hills. Conveying her personal narrative through textile art, she hopes to illustrate the vulnerable beauty of any scar or physical impairment.

Her work explores how materials found, broken or repaired can hold more narrative value than new. Like scars to the skin, she hopes this can further highlight the beauty in imperfection. Imagined landscapes of sketch-like embroidery allow the viewer to look beyond their see-through layers, exploring fleeting memories, healing scars and the fragile beauty in repair.