Lucy Mayes

Lucy Mayes is an artist and pigment maker. Her work uses urban waste stream materials to make recycled pigment as a way of narrating a modern lived experience. Her practice is centred on the use of unusual, surprising or esoteric raw materials to make colour, as a way of documenting events or ‘happenings’ that she encounters. Through her work she hopes to communicate how she navigates the complexities of the hierarchy of materials. She loves collecting earth colours around where she lives and further a field in Britain but it is the transformation of banal waste materials that she finds most potent. The earth’s natural resources to make pigment (especially in relation to industrially made synthetic colours) are slowly depleting, and one way to help conserve these materials is to reuse and remake colour anew.