Lucy May Schofield has an enduring connection to the sky, rooted by a childhood spent in rural Lincolnshire, where the endless sky formed imaginary dreamscapes. She is still captivated by expansive, vast, desert-like landscapes. In coherence with the living world, her work reflects on our place in the cosmos, inviting a dialogue around the transient nature of our collective experience and our interconnectedness to one another.
Working with a palette of earth and mineral pigments, Schofield finds meaning in materials, establishes touch as essence and making as a meditative act. Her practice of carving wood blocks, gathering colours, hand printing and dyeing paper embodies a slow rate that honours each process, taking the time it needs to become. Her exploration of shapes and colour emerge as constellations, or interior landscapes, responsive to an inherent wisdom or remembrance as being of nature; an intuitive co-creation with earth and sky.
Recent developments have seen the artist create a series of works on handmade mulberry paper from Echizen, Japan, a place with a sacred and historic relationship to washi production. She combines varying thicknesses of kozo washi, applying layers of translucent pigment with the intention of allowing the ethereal beauty of the paper to be illuminated.
Lucy May Schofield (1979) is a British artist. She studied Printmaking and Book Arts at London College of Printing, and is now based in rural Northumberland where she continues to practice water-based woodcut. She regularly travels to Japan to study under master craftspeople using traditional and contemporary mokuhanga techniques. Her prints have been presented at The Kentler International Drawing Space in New York, The London Original Print Fair, and The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Her work is held in private and public collections including Tate Britain and Yale Centre for British Art. In 2021 she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award to develop her sustainable printmaking practice. Lucy was awarded the Flourish Award for excellence in print-making by WYPW in 2020. In 2022 she was elected as an associate member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and the selected print fellow resident at the Scuola Internazionale Grafica in Venice in 2025. She is the recipient of various residencies in Japan, Iceland, California, Quebec, Florence, Scotland and Wales and notable commissions from Diageo for site-responsive expanded print works for the interior of the Port Ellen distillery on the island of Islay. She is a founding member of the Mokuhanga Sisters collective, an international group of nine artists across five countries who together, curate, collaborate and exhibit to promote the art of mokuhanga.