Lydia Denno has worked for the past thirteen years as a theatre designer, designing sets, costumes and props for regional and London theatres.

She sees the design of a production as a visual chronicle which runs concurrently to the text of the play. The design primarily assists and contextualises the story, but can also provide narrative deviations beyond the spoken word in order to lay clues to character history or to emphasise a theme or philosophy of thought. Her work is often symbolic and representational.

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She is drawn towards under-represented stories and characters, is inspired by what can be communicated in the most minute of moments, and excited by what stories lie in the detail.

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Lydia also works as an Authorial Illustrator and has developed a strand of her practice using the stage of the page; experimenting with the form of the book, and the dialogue between words and illustrations, to explore the storytelling of the quotidian.

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Her recent illustration work has two core lines of enquiry;

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The first is an interest in non-momentous occasions that leave a mark.
What impact might there be in the smallest of moments and the most banal of gestures?

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The second is concerned with the relationship between ‘lines’; lived, drawn and written. What lines do we forge on the landscape tangibly and metaphysically as we live and move; what lines do we inscribe into people’s memories, and how might these lines be seen as accumulating illustrations or poems that we will draw or write over the course of a lifetime?