LUCY MAHON

There's a dreamlike nostalgia in the work of Lucy Mahon; revealed through quietude, mark-making, her almost story-book imagery and a reverberant, practically pointillist approach. A graduate of History of Art and English, Mahon recalls growing up "in a busy household with a single mum," and themes of safety, home, and the comfort of ritual are evidenced in her work. These themes would be "domestic" but contemporary connotations equate domesticity to femininity, and there's nothing inherently gender-political about Mahon's scenes. They're dreamlike, sure, but they aren't traditionally about "the home" and gendered space as much as they allude to the fantastical. This instinct to "look closer," is tantamount to Mahon's practice. She credits "snapshots, spoken fragments, shifts in memory" and inspiring travels through unfamiliar settings as part of her ongoing artistic dialogue.

A desire to "zoom-in" in order to focus intensely on the considered space; but the flipside is the need to "zoom-out," and with this in mind, Mahon subverts traditional expectations (or perhaps fully embraces a pastoral tradition) where viewers can anticipate the "canniness" of a comfortable home, a quiet fire, or a path charted through the night sky, and it appears that it's the greater idea of home and homeliness that Mahon desires to touch upon. We can feel very alone at home... In contrast, we can feel very much at home on the other side of the world, and it is precisely this sense of comforting disquiet that the work finds its strength.

For Mahon, the work undulates between ideas of childhood and adulthood. Innocence and (not "loss of innocence," but rather) Experience. What's nice about this dichotomy is the implication that age doesn't diminish our sense of childlike wonder and that - possibly - it only presents us further opportunities for awe, mysticism, unfinished ideas, rough-hewn dreams, capital-P Possibilities.

Mahon's first exhibition with BEERS debuts autumn 2025.