Lydia Makin

Lydia Makin (b. 1997, Nottingham, UK) holds an MA from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2020). Selected exhibitions include a two-person exhibition with Eleanor Johnson at Harper’s Chelsea, New York (2026), Harper’s at Art SG, Singapore (2026), NADA New York (2025), Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv (2025), and Gallery Rosenfeld, London (2022). Makin has received the UCL East Provost Art Prize (2020), the Slade Prize (2020), the Richard Ford Award for Drawing (2017), and the Painters’ Stainers’ Company Scholarship (2017). Makin is currently a resident at Silver Art Projects in New York. In today’s fractured artistic landscape, where the past is continually re-engaged yet never fully resurrected, Makin’s work moves beyond the traditional modernist impulse, striving for spiritual transcendence while cultivating a multi-temporal vision attuned to the currents of her time. The paintings emerge from a porous state between self and world, where thought gives way to feeling and intention to instinct. Makin embraces the tension of not-knowing, allowing images to unfold and find their own rhythm. Makin invites the viewer into their own senses, dreams, worlds, and inner symbolic lives. This opening is not prescriptive but expansive, creating a space in which personal desires, longings, and emotional landscapes might surface. While the work may hold the potential to inspire or transform, Makin resists positioning it as a panacea, allowing such experiences to remain contingent on the individual encounter.