Alexis Soul-Gray

Alexis Soul-Gray's practice - predominantly of painting, drawing and printmaking - revolves around a speculative questioning of the memorial, nostalgia and commemoration, which brings together a conjecture of imagery taken from public archival materials.

Appropriation and detournement of paper ephemera and found objects are central to Soul-Gray’s process, becoming reference materials that are first gathered and then – gently, or at times forcefully - unmade, defaced, recreated. The artworks that emerge are a manifestation of a shattering personal trauma, but also an attempt to speak of the universal experience of loss and nostalgic longing.

Specific to the artist’s unique style is a varying visual vocabulary across her oeuvre, as each artwork is partly conditioned by the found material(s) employed as a starting point, and the subjective, emotional element conjured during its development. Both the conscious and the subconscious are present, and memory, with its many facets, an active participant.  

In Soul Gray’s own words:

There are multiple voices and modes of working within my practice, each one as necessary as the next. Like structural pillars that underpin a bridge, without them the creative journey cannot be made. My works may read as being made by a different artist, perhaps muddled and disjointed but this is deliberate. They are a direct manifestation of a shattering and destructive personal trauma, creating a lexicon of possibilities that attempt to speak of the universal experience of loss, the fragmented, broken recall of memory that trauma induces.

I use appropriation, detournement and the reordering of paper ephemera and found objects to explore the fluid nature of recall, allowing intuition to lead the work through various states of exploration until reaching a final resting place. Images are continuously intersecting, abrasive, harmonious, removed. The saccharin and the abject sit in a purposefully contradictory language.

____

Alexis Soul-Gray (b. 1980, UK), lives and works in Devon. She earned an MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London (2023) and a BA in Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, London (2003). She is an alumni of The Royal Drawing School, London having completed the Postgraduate Drawing Year in 2007. Solo exhibitions include The Arts Club, London (2024); Bel Ami, LA (2023); Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2022); Irving Contemporary, Oxford (2022); Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2022); and Delphian Gallery, London (2021). Recent group exhibitions include The Guts And The Glory, Bo Lee & Workman, Bruton (2024); Paper, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London (2023); Conscious Unconscious, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023); Women Celebrating Surrealism, Islington Arts Factory, London (2022); What Was lost, PAPER Gallery, Manchester (2022). She was invited for an important residency at The Artist House Kadenowka, Rabka, Poland (Studio Paulina Olowska) in the summer of 2022; was the winner of the Delphian Open in 2021; and recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in both 2021 and 2022. Soul-Gray's first monograph, Immutable Fragments, was published by Bel Ami LA in April 2024. Her work is featured in the permanent collection of Moderna Museum, Stockholm, and in private collections worldwide. 

____