Mermaids

On the raft-like terrace of Aldo’s Cocktail Bar & Seafood Grill, a sad and wistful mermaid sits on the prow of a boat, turning her face from the distant islands of her sister sirens – islands that gave Le Sirenuse its name. Installed on one of our iconic Pompeii-red walls, Lucy Stein’s tiled ceramic work is painted using the wax resist technique, one more usually associated with batik fabric dyeing. A nearby staircase features a series of playfully arch and ironic pen and ink drawings on the same theme by Stein, which spill over onto Aldo’s printed menu.

British artist Lucy Stein works on the border between land, sky and sea, in the far west of Cornwall. In her work, too, she likes to inhabit the edgelands, swimming between myth and reality, figuration and abstraction, this earthly sphere and the far reaches of the cosmos. One recurrent figure in her paintings is the mermaid: half woman, half fish, torn between her watery element and human terra firma, between danger and docility, the desire for love and the urge to destroy, or self-destruct.