Lucy Bevitt’s work emerges from a deeply personal engagement with landscape, memory, and folklore. Growing up in Yorkshire, the natural world around her was imbued with the magic of her father’s stories—kelpies, shapeshifting spirits, and ancient tales drawn from local folklore. Over time, as the wide-eyed wonder of childhood began to fade, painting became a way to reconnect with that lost enchantment.

 

Her unfamiliar terrains explore the relationship between inner and outer space, reflecting a continuous quest to merge the opposing forces of the unconscious and conscious. Through layered, expressive brushwork, Bevitt evokes dreamlike scenes where past, present, and imagined landscapes collide. Submerged rivers, fluid contours, and dissolving forms suggest both memory and myth—half-remembered childhood visions now reawakened.

 

In works like Rising Pond, figures emerge and dissipate like mist from the waters of the River Ure, including the recurring presence of a kelpie—a spirit creature that shifts between horse and human. Organic matter and spirit intermingle, with algae and kelp spiraling through watery realms, wrapping around spectral forms in states of playful metamorphosis.

 

Bevitt’s cosmological approach invokes a sense of isotropy—where everything, everywhere, shares a fundamental sameness. In her painted worlds, beings and landscapes blur and merge, echoing nature’s continuous cycle: where plants and spirits bloom, die, collapse, and decompose onto the seabed.