I caught up with Lucy one afternoon in the Gather.ly office, to talk about exactly how she does it and what inspirations lay behind her work. Lucy graduated from Bristol UWE in 2009 and it was here where she first began to develop her style and strong love for collage.
Although originally interested in Illustration, Lucy openly admits that drawing didn't really click for her in the way she'd first imagined.
I soon found that drawing perhaps wasn't for me, I just couldn't express myself how I wanted to with it. I began to create collages instead and that's what I really enjoyed.
Lucy's unique approach to her images really creates a sense of wonder and intrigue behind the subjects in the work. You instantly want to know more about the characters in the collages, their stories, and if they have any personal relation to the artist herself.
Lucy tells me that her passion really started when her Auntie gave her a treasure box full of old family photographs and magazines. Riffling though decades of faces and stories, she began to create personal studies into her own family tree by experimenting with old photography albums and scrap books. To get the vintage effect, Lucy cuts the photographs out and rearranges them back together before scanning them on the computer. This gives a real scrapbook feel, rather than relying on photoshop to create the effect for her.
To find inspiration, as well as my own family photographs, I would go to car boot sales and have fun with the things that I found there. I soon found that things like this are quite relevant now, people are quite interested in this style...
Currently, she tells us that she is working on building up her own business, where she has connections with stockists and online shops such as Etsy. Being able to bring her style into the public eye has become one of her main goals since graduating.
I've found that working on my new collections, compared to those I created at University, I've had to slightly change the way I create my collages. I think that my style can be quite abstract and so I've worked on toning it down a bit but without losing it's uniqueness.
Chatting to Lucy, she touches upon a very interesting point that the work made in universities by creatives is not always so easy to share with the public. When you're at university you are surrounded by fellow creatives who enjoy the abstract, and encourage your style, but once you leave it's harder to translate that into a livelihood. Being able to adapt to this, yet still keep your own head and create the way you want too, is a hard skill. One that I feel Lucy has totally mastered as she shows me some of the more commercial work of hers currently on sale.
At Gather.ly we love to know about personal projects and the secret wishes of the artists that we meet, I asked Lucy what her dream project would be if she had one.
I saw recently that John Lewis were having an anniversary and using loads of old archives to create with, I'd love to be given free reign with something like that!
Lucy mentions that being able to get her hands on a well known brand to access their archives and go wild with the stories would be perfect for her style.
I have no doubt Lucy is on the right track, her work is stunning, so consistent in both style and quality. We'd love to collaborate with her in the future. If you'd like to see more of Lucy's work and delve deeper into her stories then check out her site here www.lucydriscoll.com and follow her blog lucydriscoll.tumblr.com
