"'You were 12 years ago and I am now'" Artwork

Lydia Lott is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles, sculpture, drawing and printmaking. Their practice explores the relationship between interior life and the spaces we inhabit, with a particular interest in the porous boundary between public and private experience. Lott's work is interested in the ways that spaces and objects accumulate traces of the people who move through them, and in how psychological experience can become material.

At the centre of their practice is an interest in the ordinary spaces in which we are most unguarded: bedrooms, beds, domestic interiors and the objects that surround us. Drawing on phenomenological ideas of dwelling, their work conceptualises the home not simply as a physical structure, but as a space shaped by the body, memory, habit and imagination. These spaces can hold multiple temporalities at once. A room can contain what is happening now alongside everything that has happened there before; memory can persist within the present.

The bed has become an important site within this investigation. It is one of the few spaces in which the body is permitted to completely surrender itself—to rest, sleep, recover, dream and exist without the demands of public presentation. Images of bodies in beds therefore become less about individual identity than about a shared condition of being human. Vulnerability, nakedness, tiredness and bodily dependence are experiences that precede our social differences. By bringing these private moments into the visual field, Lott's work makes visible something ordinarily concealed: the universal humanness that exists beneath our performed identities.

This relationship between concealment and revelation underlies their practice. Works incorporating subconscious symbols etch forms and figures directly into the surfaces of macbooks, transforming objects purposely designed for hyper-readability into mysterious relics of an internal and psychological form of language.

Ultimately, Lott's practice is concerned with 'the Real'. The lived, embodied experience that can be obscured by structures concerned with rhetoric, division, manipulation and obfuscation.