THE SIT DOWN
05: LYDIA HAMBLET
Originally from Kent, Lydia studied at Camberwell before taking up a residency at Topolski Studios, where she immersed herself in reportage drawing — an old haunt of reportage drawing, where artists once sketched wars and movements before photography. It became a lesson in immediacy, in catching the atmosphere of a space, in re-learning how to draw sound and motion. That sensibility has stayed with her.
A year out between her BA and the RCA proved formative. She travelled to India — a country connected to her through her grandfather — and the colour, vibrancy, and vastness of its landscapes became a catalyst for her printmaking experiments. Screenprinting and monoprinting gave her a technical grounding, and whilst at the RCA, Lydia started working at a new scale, producing vast four-metre works on rolls of paper. The challenge of working that big — technical, physical, immersive — became central to her approach when she decided to begin painting. Lydia’s practice sits between scale and intimacy, colour and memory. Her work resists being neatly photographed — it thrives in presence, in energy, in the act of looking.
Her subject matter often begins with place: sports pitches, parks, collective spaces where bodies move in rhythm. From there, she builds atmospheres rather than straightforward depictions — pushing for a scale that engulfs, a sense of presence that feels lived rather than observed. She’s interested in phenomenology and the experience of place; Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness has been a touchstone. Alongside that, poetry has become a quiet influence — many of her titles are fragments of poems, titles often borrowed from Alice Oswald or Zaffar Kunial — giving each work an added rhythm without being prescriptive.
For Lydia, the most vital works come when she trusts her instincts: chasing scale, colour, and the elusive energy of a place made present. Lydia has exhibited in London and abroad, with a solo show at Pictorum Gallery in 2023 and more recently a small solo in San Remo.