Bio
Lucienne Mettam is a New York and Maryland-based artist whose drawings explore perception as shaped by the often unseen connections between individuals, species, and environments. Working primarily in graphite on Yupo paper, she creates layered compositions where clarity and obscurity coexist.
While studying at Parsons School of Design, she was introduced to theoretical frameworks that deepened her interest in overlapping sensory experiences and non-linear ways of seeing. Her training in fashion design sharpened her sensitivity to structure, material, and surface, evident in her translucent forms, restrained palettes, and nuanced textures.
Mettam’s solo exhibitions include Transience (Rise Projects, New York, NY), and Phantasms (ArtHub609, Washington, DC, 2025). Selected group exhibitions include Art + Arch with Bell Architects (2025), Visual AIDS: Postcards From the Edge (2024), and the Huntington Arts Council’s Master’s Invitational (2020). Her work has been featured in Nepenthe Gallery (Alexandria, VA), Arete (New York, NY), and Vault of Visions (Frederick, MD), and is held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States.
Statement
My work is rooted in a fascination with forms that resist certainty. From an early age, I was drawn to clouds, smoke, and water, substances that exist in a constant state of becoming. I was captivated by their translucency, the way one form could be seen through another, and the sense of multiple states existing at once. Currently, my concepts often draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, particularly his understanding of perception as embodied and constituted through lived experience. This perspective positions embodied awareness as an active and relational process, contingent on the body’s movement through space and its ongoing exchange with surrounding environments.
Working on Yupo paper, my process moves between gesture and precision. I use graphite sticks, industrial blocks, discs, and carved grooves to build layers. As some works develop, my approach becomes more technical, building moments of clarity and introducing realistic elements using graphite powder. I rarely use a pencil; instead, I work with the sides of graphite materials and erasers to push, spread, and lift the medium. By repeatedly blurring and sharpening my vision, I study how forms surface and recede and how perception shifts with attention. I work in monochrome, grayscale, and restrained color palettes which invite a mode of imagination, opening space for ambiguity, projection, and interpretation.
Across abstraction and figurative composition, my work is unified by an ongoing interest in how experience is formed through a range of interwoven influences that are deeply personal and complex for each individual. Figures function as vessels for experience rather than fixed identities, often fragmented or translucent to suggest awareness moving within the body. My abstract work hovers between recognition and uncertainty, focusing on the moment when a form begins to emerge and then recede. I'm interested in the moment the eye organizes ambiguity and the mind shapes what it believes it sees, echoing the phenomenon of pareidolia.
I sign my work as "Enne", drawn from my name, Lucienne. "Enne" is a French-derived suffix that indicates feminine form. I am inspired by femininity as it relates to identity and fluidity, and I chose this element of my name to acknowledge that context.