About Lucy Newman

Lucy Newman is a contemporary hand embroidery artist creating thread paintings and embroidered artworks that explore future ecologies, digital distortion and bodily disorientation. Working through the slow physicality of stitch, she transforms unstable images into dense, tactile surfaces.

Her practice sits between painting, textile art and contemporary embroidery. Beginning with digitally altered imagery, Lucy uses hand embroidery to examine how bodies, landscapes and technologies can become glitched, fragmented or transformed.

Practice

Lucy’s work confronts the tension between digital immediacy and the physical labour of traditional hand embroidery. Her embroidered paintings imagine future natural forms shaped by climate change, technological interference and environmental mutation.

Living with Mal de Débarquement Syndrome, a neurological condition that creates a persistent sensation of motion, has shaped Lucy’s interest in instability, distortion and altered perception. This embodied experience feeds into works where botanical forms appear to slip, mutate or resist fixed representation.

The process of hand embroidery is central to the work. Stitch becomes a way of slowing down unstable images, translating digital distortion into physical surface. Colour, thread direction and density accumulate gradually, creating works that hold a tension between control and disruption.