Lucy Devenish
committee member
Lucy Devenish (MA Fine Art) currently lives and works in Sussex. Her practice is driven by her explorations of remote landscapes. The source of her work is a desire to be bodily and sensorily immersed as fully as possible in landscape, approaching it not as a scene to be viewed but as a space to be experienced. Making journeys to coastal areas of the British Isles, she sketches in the landscape and undertakes wild swims, which she films using a head camera. Adhering to tight conceptual parameters, the making of each swim is an act of endurance and immersion – working becomes breathing, sweating, struggling.
Back in the studio, Lucy translates the sketches she has made, the maps she has scrutinised and the footage from the swims undertaken into bodies of work relating to the coastlines experienced. Recognition of the dispersal of her wake in the water is the driving force for making through which she seeks both to recollect and to map her swims. The act of moving through wild water is exhilarating, nerve-racking, intensely vibrant; yet, even though each immersion is captured on digital film, there is constant awareness that this – this now, this sensation – can neither be relived nor truly shared. Her work acts as an elegaic realisation of this paradox.