‘I want to bring anxiety to the surface': Shannon Cartier Lucy on her unsettling works

‘My creative process always entails taking more or less familiar images and rearranging them to create a disruption,’ says Nashville-based artist Shannon Cartier Lucy. ‘I want to bring anxiety to the surface. This can be a threat to our ego and can make us feel vulnerable.’

It is an unsettling emotion brought to the forefront at Lucy’s current exhibition at London’s Soft Opening gallery, which imbues quotidian images of childhood with an electric charge. In Lucy’s paintings, nostalgic symbols - pencils, straws, pasta necklace - are reframed, becoming play things for adults in a stark confrontation of the childhood memories we repress. The results can be discomfiting.

‘Tapping into this irreducible anxiety is a form of un-homing, which is a critical concept that describes the experience of being displaced from our sense of security and “home.”,’ Lucy adds. ‘I am interested in creating a “new home,” so to speak. My ritual in conjuring up these images and uncomfortable feelings to the surface and sharing them with others is a way to perhaps neutralize the anxiety. It’s like a prayer, almost.’

Lucy draws on cinematic framing techniques to up the psychological tension, with her tight crops forcing a close examination of her subject. But despite the clarity an apparently straight representation, Lucy’s storytelling is full of ambiguities

‘We tend to place an omnipotence in understanding things, and making sense of things. We are conditioned to try to stay in control because we assume it will keep us safe. To be able to organize and grasp the world gives us comfort. So facing ambiguity is an inherently traumatic experience. I hope that making these paintings can shift around my own experience with uncertainty and make that relatable and communicable.’

Shannon Cartier Lucy is at Soft Opening until 10 January 2026

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