Bio
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Lucienne Mettam is an 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 in which clarity and obscurity coexist.
Raised in rural Maryland, Mettam developed an early attentiveness to landscape and wildlife, which continues to inform her work. While studying at Parsons School of Design, she was introduced to the concept of synesthesia, a framework that clarified her interest in overlapping sensory experience and non-linear ways of seeing. Her training in fashion design sharpened her sensitivity to structure, material, and surface, which carries through in her restrained palettes, translucent forms, and nuanced use of texture. She lives and works in New York City, where the density, scale, and rhythm of the urban environment have expanded her practice to include architectural forms and the psychological experience of the constructed environment.
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Mettam’s solo exhibitions include Phantasms (ArtHub609, Washington, DC, 2025) and Vanishings (Riverworks Art Center, 2025). 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 Lock House Gallery (Brunswick, MD), and is held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States.
Statement
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My work is rooted in a fascination with forms that resist certainty. As a child, I was drawn to clouds, smoke, and water, substances that exist in a constant state of becoming. What captivated me most was their translucency, the ability to see one form through another and to experience multiple states of presence at once. From an early age, I experienced the world with heightened sensitivity, closely attending to sounds, sights, and subtle shifts in my environment. I often attached meaning to patterns and visual coincidences that others might overlook. This way of seeing continues to guide my work, grounding it in an exploration of perception as deeply personal, variable, and unstable.
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Working on Yupo paper, my process moves between gesture and precision. It begins expansively, using graphite sticks to move freely across the smooth, non-porous surface in a gestural, intuitive way. As the work develops, my approach shifts. I become more focused and technical, building moments of clarity and adding realistic elements. By repeatedly blurring and sharpening my vision, I study how forms surface and recede, and how perception changes with attention.
Human figures, architecture, animals, and landscape appear in my work as forms unified by an ongoing interest in how perception shifts across bodies and environments. Humans function as vessels for experience rather than specific identities, often fragmented or translucent to reflect moments when awareness migrates within the body, shaped by memory, emotion, and environment. Architecture and landscape enter my work through an interest in movement within forms we often perceive as still. Having long used the human body as a source of inspiration for motion, I recognize similar qualities in cityscapes and natural structures, which appear not as static objects but as responsive presences shaped by rhythm, light, and time. Moving between rural and urban environments heightened my awareness of how animals are alternately familiar, abstracted, or ignored. Animals appear as carriers of memory, vulnerability, and resilience. Through these subjects, sensory experience acts as a unifying thread, allowing disparate forms to exist within a shared visual language defined by attentiveness, overlap, and change.​
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I sign my work as “Enne,” drawn from my name, Lucienne, which in French means “bringer of light.” “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.
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