Lindsay Servian is a UK-based contemporary artist whose practice examines how systems, culture and health shape everyday life through material and conceptual enquiry.

Sugar, Systems, Culture (2025-26)

Sugar 1, 2026, Isomalt and Books

In this artwork, sugar is hidden in plain sight as a book. And yet, despite the concealment, it's the sugar book that will get chosen.

Like chapters in a book, Sugar 1 opens the exhibition into considering sugar’s harm and how it's embedded culturally, socially and structurally.

Untitled (Triptych), 2026, Cake board, ink, mirror, resin, vinyl, watercolour

Plaque: 25 cm diameter. Porthole: 35 cm diameter. Caption: 21 cm x 26 cm

These works examine sugar’s hidden harms across past, present, and future - from the legacies of plantation economies and structures that remain with us, to embodied health impacts and the delayed consequences that accumulate over time.

Exhibition: Beneath Sweetness (2026)

Beneath Sweetness brings together a new body of work examining how sugar operates as a cultural constant: normalised, celebrated, and structurally embedded within everyday life.

Through sculpture, image and text, the exhibition considers sugar’s visibility and concealment, its historical weight, and its continued presence despite widespread awareness of harm.

Presented at the Neuron Pod, Queen Mary University of London, in collaboration with Action on Salt & Sugar.
5 March 2026, London.

For further about the exhibition click here

Sustainability (2024-25)

Cynon Valley Museum Contemporary Art Exhibition
Mar 2025

For further details about the museum exhibition click here

Heritage

Heritage is intended as an anthropological work inviting the viewer (through use of a flashlight) to participate (like an archaeologist) in discovering the history of those who walked before in a former industrial environment.
910 mm x 610 mm (c. 36” x 24”)
Reflective (microscopic glass bead based) medium on rusted steel

Gap

Gap is a reflection on what felt like a gap (in livelihoods and changes to the community) with a blank canvas underneath that was being portrayed in discussions with former colliers and families in former mining communities, and socially engaging on discussions about thoughts for the future.
1400 mm x 1000 mm (c. 55” x 39”)
Oil painting (including hand-made coal based paint) on a collage of newspaper on canvas

Community

Community is an image of a row of landscaped, seemingly quiet, housing that was used in stimulating an oral history of communities in the past and socially engaging about the importance of various aspects of those communities for the future.
790 mm x 550 mm (c. 31” x 22”)
Image 1: Photograph projected onto manipulated rust on steel.
Image 2: Manipulated rust on steel

Environment

Rust pervades the Environment in many fomer heavy industrial areas (including river seepage) but with exciting work on cleansing.
910 mm x 610 mm (c. 36” x 24”)
Manipulated rust on steel

Environment was exhibited in the Socially Engaged Artwork exhibition ‘Community Voices, Collective Visions’ at the Cynon Valley Museum, Aberdare, Mar 2025. The Community took over authorship on environmental regeneration by adding thoughts about the environment onto the Public Mural and covering over the (H&S conscious acrylic on card faux-) rust image
1840 mm x 1200 mm (c. 72” x 48”)
Manipulated rust on steel

Beams

Beams is a work (in Vorticist tradition) looking upwards from underneath a coal mine’s lift shaft elevator. Like Gap, the work reflects thoughts about the future.
320 mm x 240 mm (c. 12” x 9.5”)
Pitt and Red Charcoal on Paper

Works on Paper (2023)

Mental health

The painting leads your eye over the Mental Health of folks that need considered and support.
Painting (on left): 520 mm x 320 mm (c. 20.5” x 12.5”)
Acrylic on paper
Included in the OCA/OU Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Calendar for Oct 2024
To view the calendar click here

Breath

Breath is an abstract industrial landscape inspired by machinery extracting foul air, and bringing clean air, into enclosed spaces.
One of a series of study works being progressed as a large-scale work. Acrylic on paper. (Rust colours may be added).

Pre-dawn

Pre-dawn. A time to yourself, to your thoughts, to “just being”. A place known but unknown.
560 mm x 360 mm (c. 22” x 14”)
Acrylic on Paper

Movement

Movement and relationships
One of a series of study works being progresed in miniature and large scale. Acrylics and gouache on paper.

Study in B&W

Study in B&W
One of a series of study works being progresed in very large scale. Acrylics on paper.

Arteries

Overuse of complex irrigation and climate change was arguably a major cause for the fall of Angkor, whilst drying reservoirs also brought disease - environmental challenges that resonate today. Arteries is a cross-section image of a human skull with ink paths that intend to mirror an angiogram. The visualisation and materials nod to Angkor stone head sculptures, disrupted lives, Memento Mori, malaria and cicadas (sound and in culture).
300 mm x 250 mm (c. 12” x 10”)
Chinese and Indian ink on Cicada Skin Xuan (paper)
Image in “wet-form” but drying. Techniques allow (temporary) “irrigation” through foam block

Angkor

Reflections on a visit to the Angor Wat complex (Ta Prohm) resulted in an interest area in entropy and how the environment and other external factors have historically, with lessons to learn, impacted civilisations and industry.
280 mm x 200 mm (c. 11” x 8”)
Gouache and watercolour on paper

Wells

Interplay of light in Wells Cathedral’s Chapter House steps
400 mm x 280 mm (c. 16” x 11”)
Watercolour on paper

Chinese works (- 2023)

Chinese calligraphy

The Chinese Calligraphy (centre) is in Bronze Script and is on display (top right) in the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen. The Library was officially opened on the 24th September 2012 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh. The calligraphy (lower right) was a gift by the artist from Au Yee-Lin (the artist’s teacher).
900 mm x 600 mm (c. 35” x 24”)
Chinese ink on paper. Original text inscribed in the Xing Hou Gui in the British Museum.
University of Aberdeen Art Collection - ABDUA 38851

Sutras

Two (of 134) pages of the Diamond Sutra after Chang Chi-Chih (1186-1266)
9140 mm x 305 mm (c. 360” x 12”)
Chinese ink on paper bound into a book

Painting

A painting of rocks and bamboo after Chinese Masters
280 mm x 140 mm (c. 11” x 5.5”)
Chinese ink on paper - a page bound into a calligraphy book (Heart Sutra) by the artist

Selected Exhibitions

**Solo Exhibition, in collaboration with Action on Salt and Sugar: Beneath Sweetness — Multi-media**
Neuron Pod, Queen Mary University of London, London, March 2026
Beneath Sweetness  is a contemporary art exhibition bringing together a series of artworks and sculptures that question the cultural, social and structural factors shaping our everyday relationships with sugar.
For further details about the exhibition click here

**Solo Exhibition: Community Voices, Collective Visions — Multi-media**
Cynon Valley Museum, Aberdare, March 2025
A solo participatory and socially engaged exhibition by contemporary artist Lindsay Servian, exploring themes of sustainable development—spanning livelihoods, community, and environment—through contextually relevant coal and steel materials. The exhibition is rooted in the heritage of the local area, housed within a historically significant site of the former Gladlys Ironworks.
For further details about the Museum exhibition click here

Calendar Feature: Mental Health, Acrylic on Paper
OCA/OU Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Calendar, October 2024
A socially conscious artwork by Lindsay Servian addressing the intersection of art and mental health, featured in the Open College of the Arts and Open University Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Calendar.
To view the calendar feature click here

Permanent Collection: Ancient Chinese Bronze Script Calligraphy, Chinese Ink on Paper
Permanent Display, Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen (2012–Present)
A traditionally inspired calligraphy piece based on an inscription in the Xing Hou Gui, a bronze vessel script from the British Museum collection, now part of the University of Aberdeen Art Collection (ABDUA 38851).

Group Exhibition: Traditional Chinese Painting
Hong Kong Country Club, 2003
A traditional Chinese ink painting presented in a collective exhibition.

Artist’s Biography

Lindsay Servian is a UK-based contemporary artist whose practice examines how systems, culture and health shape everyday life through material and conceptual enquiry. His current body of work, Beneath Sweetness, considers the ways in which sugar is embedded culturally, socially and structurally through a series of open-ended enquiries.

This work follows a socially engaged exhibition developed with a former mining community in South Wales, where he created participatory and materially sensitive artworks exploring sustainable development, presented in a local heritage museum context.

Lindsay’s artistic development is informed by extensive training in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. His work has been exhibited in a range of contexts, including a permanent Chinese calligraphy display at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen. He is currently completing an MA in Fine Art at Falmouth University, and alongside his artistic practice draws on a senior leadership background in strategy, partnerships and project delivery, which informs the organisation and realisation of complex public-facing projects.

Contact:

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