Nicola Fewings has been in love with the sea for as long as she can remember, and her love just kept growing after she moved to Cornwall. She loves exploring its sandy shores in search of tiny ocean treasures and transforming them into art under the moniker Lily & Sea.
Fewings’ shell and sea glass art is made from shells from the Cornwall coast, but this wasn’t where she first fell in love with the ocean. She discovered beachcombing during the family holidays in her youth and went on to study marine biology at Plymouth University.
Her love for the ocean took her everywhere from Mexico to the Maldives, before she settled in Cornwall. Her first artwork came together after her honeymoon in 2017 across southwest England, and people were so impressed by it that she decided to keep going.
“I set them into a frame – just a simple grid with the different shells – but loved how it turned out… At this point, we had moved to Cornwall, where I was getting out to the beach so much more, so I started making more artwork,” she wrote on her official website.
Her Instagram page kept growing over the years, and she went on to attract almost 100,000 followers. She rebranded it as Lily & Sea in 2020 and eventually decided to quit her part-time job to run her small business full-time.
