Faunal Succession is the first institutional UK exhibition by Lucía Pizzani, a Venezuelan artist based in London. The show features new installations, including work created in collaboration with artist Jaime Gili, and musician Javier Weyleri. Faunal Succession is touring to three coastal locations across the UK – Focal Point Gallery (Southend), KARST (Plymouth) and Mostyn (Llandudno). At KARST, Pizzani reconfigures the first iteration of the exhibition, shown at Focal Point Gallery, and introduces artifacts connected to the South West from The Box’s natural history collection.
Pizzani reimagines the British coast through a ‘deep time’ lens, considering Earth’s history on an immense timescale spanning billions of years. She contrasts the gradual formation of Britain’s coastal geology with rapidly evolving contemporary questions of climate change, migration and social transformation. The exhibition title refers to the principle of ‘faunal succession’: the observation of patterns in fossils that allows geologists to accurately date sedimentary rock layers so they can establish chronological timelines. For Pizzani, this physical manifestation of ‘deep time’ becomes a framework for rethinking contemporary human and ecological crises, revealing borders and national identities as constructed and recent concepts.
In Faunal Succession, Pizzani presents three environments that merge installation, sculpture, painting and sound. Combining scientific, poetic and political interpretations of the landscape, each of these environments reference the geological strata of coastal Britain, its fossils, and its living organisms. At the centre of the exhibition are a series of sculptural works made from chalk, examining the significance of this particularly unstable form of limestone to British identity. In recent years, the rhetoric of Britain as an island nation has been central to debates around Englishness, colonial legacies and multiculturalism. The current, divisive politicisation of the coastline reframes England’s picturesque white cliffs as physical and symbolic borders. At once formidable, and immutable symbols of English exceptionalism, Pizzani subverts these associations by focusing on chalk’s material qualities: it is fragile and subject to change, formed over millions of years when the British Isles were connected to larger land masses and borders did not exist.
This exhibition is in partnership with Focal Point Gallery and is generously supported by the Lucía Pizzani Exhibition Circle: Victoria and David Law (lead supporter), Maria Sukkar (lead supporter), ERA FOUNDATION, Launch Pad, Aude Fourcade, Leslie Ramos and Thomas Forwood, Flavia Nespatti, Shelley Tichborne, Erica Wax, Sophia Paulina Wilhelmsen and those who wish to remain anonymous.
Faunal Succession opens at KARST on Thursday 11 June (6 – 8pm). There will be an exhibition walk-through with the artist on 12 June (1–2pm) and Curator’s Tours with our Head of Programme, Ben Borthwick, on 26 June and 24 July (1–2pm). The show is on view at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea until 30 May and will travel on to Mostyn, Llandudno in spring 2027.
To find out more about Faunal Succession, watch Lucía Pizzani’s interview below. Produced by Realm Video for Focal Point Gallery.
About Lucía Pizzani
Lucía Pizzani (b.1975, Caracas) works across photography, sculpture, ceramics, performance and installation to explore the interrelationships between historical narratives and processes of metamorphosis in the natural world. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas), a Certificate in Conservation Biology from CERC at Columbia University (New York), and an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts (London).
This year, Lucía Pizzani was the recipient of Southcombe Barn’s 2026 International Women’s Day award, in partnership with KARST and Cassinelli Mills. Ahead of her solo exhibition at KARST, Pizzani undertook a residency at Southcombe Barn, followed by a group exhibition curated by Cassinelli Mills, Cartographies of Care.
Recent solo exhibitions include Clay, Seeds and Other Ancestors at Frieze No 9 Cork St with APSARA & Frieze Studios, (London, 2025), Trópico Pasado at Galleria Doris Ghetta (Ortisei, 2025), Morada Vegetal at Abra (Caracas, 2024) and Merunto: In the House of Spirits at Bosse & Baum (London, 2023). Current and recent projects and commissions include presentations for the Klima Biennale, KunstHaus Wien-Hundertwasser Museum (Vienna), The Storytellers at the Worcester College (Oxford), Amazon Biennial (Belém), Frieze Sculpture (London), West Middlesex Hospital in Twickenham with Chelsea and Westminster Foundation Trust (London), Harewood Biennial (Leeds), Palazzo Bolani for Planet B: Climate Change and the New Sublime, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud (Venice) and the Serpentine Galleries’ SEEDS programme (London). Pizzani’s work is held in public collections including Tate, Magasin3 (Stockholm), the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA), and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and the Government Art Collection UK. She lives and works in London where she is a studio artist at Gasworks.
