Lucy Ridges
United Kingdom
Biography
Lucy Ridges is a visual artist and photographer based in Manchester, specialising in analogue photography and traditional mark-making techniques. Over the past decade her work has focused on the representation of the female form through experimental photographic processes such as cyanotype printing, multiple exposures, photopolymer gravure and hand colouring.
Lucy holds an MA in Photography from Manchester Metropolitan University and a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from the University of Central Lancashire. She lectures in Photography at Salford University and has exhibited widely across the UK, including at The Lowry, Salford; HOME, Manchester; Bankley Gallery, Manchester; and Lumen Crypt, London. Lucy has also participated in artist residencies in Iceland, La Gomera, the Isle of Skye, and Cornwall.
Her work explores the relationship between the human body, nature, and the cosmos, embracing the tactile and unpredictable qualities of analogue processes.
Project
“Half Girl” by Lucy Ridges is an ongoing photographic art series that merges analogue photography with hand-applied acrylic paint, creating unique, one-off prints that blur the line between photography and painting. In each work, Ridges overlays washes of colour that visually split the image in half, evoking natural elements such as oceans, hills and sunlight and opening a dialogue between the human form and its environment.
The project reflects Ridges’s interest in materiality, experimentation and the tactile nature of analogue processes, foregrounding a creative negotiation between control and unpredictability. By combining photographic capture with painterly intervention, Half Girl explores how layered techniques can expand the expressive potential of the photographic medium itself.
