We are delighted to introduce Memory Play, a solo exhibition by UK based Alexis Soul-Gray, who will present a group of new paintings in Bo Lee and Workman’s converted Methodist church gallery space this January.
At times disjointed and muddled, her works reflect the process of reckoning with the past and the memories she has lost and yearns for. Taking formulaic, idealised and clichéd images of women and children, she tears, cuts, rubs, scratches and bleaches them, embedding them within fragmented layers. The resulting works speak of the universal experience of loss, the mother and nostalgic longing.
A direct manifestation of a shattering personal trauma, the act of collecting and assemblage provides Soul-Gray with the opportunity to reimagine the idealised and faked images that permeate our culture. Destructive, reparative and hopefully melancholic, Soul-Gray's work presents a watchful gaze over these past lives as she re-writes their narrative through her tender transformation of the found image. Painting, drawing and collage explore echoes of the past, played out by the reparative act of collecting, selecting and re-making of public archival materials such as books, magazines, postcards and other ephemera.
Excerpts from an essay “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”, by Dr Zoë Mendelson for Memory Play:
“In one of Soul-Gray’s most arresting paintings, a cast of characters faces forward in what looks like the curtain call for a school play or amateur production. Many of the expectant faces in this tableau vivant look out at us for approval or applause. Some of the figures are costumed,or are perhaps creatures that we only imagine to hold children inside them. Some have the irresistible guise of stickers or cyphers, adhered to the surface of the painting. In this work, the familiar and unfamiliar sit very close to each other, rubbing off on each other. I believe I was in this play. Then I realise how strange and dark it is, and that I have never seen it before.”
“Within this new body of densely watchable new works, there is a sense of crush emerging in a carefully managed tumult of imagery and texture tousling for foreground status. We are witness to an organised parade of fallings apart and comings together as they provoke a sort of merry-go-round methodology, within which driving figures backwards through bleaching, rubbing, staining leaves them waiting in the wings, awaiting their possible return to the surface. In these complex works, erasure functions as an additive - the semi-removal of a figure or form rendering it a phantom, with much to contribute and presence enough not to be left behind. The figures in the foreground often flatten, selling us their knitwear, the organised chaos of their school play, their costumes, their t-bar shoes (with socks pulled up). The shadowy figures in the behind are searching and gleaning, pulling wet blankets of paint over themselves and sneaking around wanting to be drawn further in, like understudies.”
Alexis Soul-Gray (b.1980, UK), lives and works in Devon. She completed a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts, London (2003), the Postgraduate Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School in 2007, and most recently an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2023).
Dr Zoë Mendelson is an artist and writer with an expanded painting practice. Her work includes various forms of writing (fiction and non-fiction), painting, collage, drawing, installation, and singing. Mendelson has exhibited widely showing works, performing and publishing, nationally and internationally. Her work is also installed permanently (visibly and covertly) in public buildings. She is Head of Painting & Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art and co-founder and editor of The Edit, an online and inclusive, de-canonised bibliography for students in Fine Art and related fields, used in arts education internationally. zoemendelson.co.uk
