I am Lucy Dewsnap, also known as BearSuit— the fierce and fuzzy alterego that blurs boundaries between the human and animal experience. Based in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, I am a queer multimedia artist (MFA) creating through painting, sculpture, photography, film, printmaking, zines, and community workshops.
My practice explores entangled relationships: how bodies—human, animal, plant—connect in ways that are symbiotic, violent, tender, and political. Bearsuit weaves autobiography with ecological and social realities, reflecting on identity, survival, belonging, and the empathy gaps shaped by class and environment. My first major solo exhibition, Human Animal (Barnsley Civic), examined these themes through the eyes of both observer and observed, highlighting resilience, working-class empathy, and our shared struggles in an unforgiving socio-economic landscape.
Rooted in Barnsley’s post-industrial places and communities, I engage the overlooked—cracked pavements, weeds, predator-prey dynamics, acts of care in marginalised groups. Whether through playful prints, intimate films, or participatory projects on LGBTQIA+ safety and visibility, my work makes space for complexity: joy and grief, humour and urgency, the personal and the collective.
Bearsuit invites closer looking and deeper feeling—an invitation to acknowledge we are never separate from the worlds we inhabit, and to honour the strange, soft, stubborn beauty of staying alive together.