Working in painting, collage, assemblage and printmaking, Soul-Gray explores ideas of nurture, dereliction and the mother archetype in relation to trauma and loss. She employs a variety of found imagery and objects, both as points of reference and as physical material to question issues around memorial, nostalgia and commemoration.

Soul-Gray regularly utilises processes such as appropriation, detournement (rerouting/hijacking) and the re-ordering of paper ephemera, such as vintage knitting patterns and book illustrations, as well as found objects and art historical references. Her imagery is often defaced and re-made, scratched and scraped away at, before being tenderly transformed, variously into paintings, prints and drawings, in which the saccharin and the abject sit in a purposefully contradictory conversation. In this way, she explores the fluid nature of recall, allowing intuition to lead the work through various states of exploration until reaching their final resting place.

She describes her works as “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 mother and nostalgic longing.”

The exhibition follows a period of residency in the gallery, during which Soul-Grey aimed to experiment with bringing more sculptural elements into her practice and with working at a larger scale than has previously been possible. It will be a chance to see recent paintings, shown for the first time in the UK before the artist’s first international solo exhibition in New York later this year and may also include new work made during the residency period.

This exhibition forms part of our Platform programme, which offers artists based in the South West region opportunities to test out ideas, new work and recent developments in their practice.