‘I discovered vitality from someplace very deep’: artist Alexis Soul-Grey on navigating the gallery scene via grief and motherhood – The Artwork Newspaper

Primarily based in Devon with two younger youngsters, Alexis Soul-Grey is forging a profession on her personal phrases. Final week the 44-year-old artist opened her first solo exhibition with Bo Lee and Workman, a comparatively new gallery in Bruton, Somerset, which picked up Soul-Grey after London’s Simon Lee gallery folded in 2023. The closure got here at an important second within the artist’s profession.

“It was heart-breaking. I used to be becoming a member of this nice gallery and I’d taken on a much bigger studio. However, simply as I used to be resulting from have a giant solo present, they went into administration,” Soul-Grey says. Thankfully, the artist was in a position to divert most of her work to a different exhibition at her Los Angeles gallery, Bel Ami.

Now, she is exhibiting eleven new canvases within the Bruton gallery, together with Final Breath. Soul-Grey created Final Breath whereas learning her postgraduate diploma on the Royal School of Artwork in London as a mature scholar. Although graduating from the RCA marked a excessive level in her profession, it additionally capped a very tough time in her life. Soul-Grey’s mom died by assisted suicide, after being identified with most cancers, when the artist was simply 25 and nonetheless learning on the Royal Drawing College. “It was a quick expertise, she died in 5 months,” Soul-Grey says.

As a consequence, a lot of her work “comes from displacement from a grief expertise”, as Soul-Grey places it. “I used to be happy with my mum, though it was extraordinarily painful. However what I skilled after was a really destroyed household. A household that had been taken aside. I very a lot felt orphaned as a result of my dad wasn’t in a great place. It was actually like a lower out household.”

Minimize outs typically seem in Soul-Grey’s work. She started making collages throughout the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic and now they kind an integral a part of her follow. Different occasions, figures are left intact, corresponding to the top and shoulders of a younger lady Soul-Grey sourced from {a magazine} within the cobalt blue portray Spring has Come Early and it’s as if the Season Marks my Disappointment.

Discovered photos of youngsters typically function the place to begin for the artist’s work. The Horse Whisperer (2024) began from {a photograph} of a gaggle of younger youngsters posing subsequent to a chained bear that Soul-Grey purchased on eBay. “I have no idea the place they’re, however they’re purported to be having enjoyable,” she says. “I’ll very often be drawn to a picture for causes my acutely aware thoughts just isn’t all the time instantly conscious of—on this occasion it’s the bear and the youngsters’s unease that’s related, as a result of I bear in mind seeing a chained bear on vacation as a baby and feeling a deep sense of unhappiness.” The horse head, in the meantime, is symbolic of her mom. “In my reminiscence she is all the time with horses,” Soul-Grey says.

Turning into a mom herself offered all-too acquainted challenges for the artist. “I did discover it fairly laborious. I wouldn’t say motherhood was a [creative] catalyst for me, as a result of I felt very a lot penned into that life and suffocated,” she says. “I felt like I had a number of years taken from me via grief after which motherhood, and that I needed to discover this vitality, which got here from someplace very deep.”

Discovering her place inside a gallery system geared in the direction of enlargement and productiveness, typically to the detriment of artists’ psychological well being, was an added strain. “It’s fairly laborious to return again from motherhood and discover that urgency throughout the gallery system,” Soul-Grey says. Alongside her Los Angeles gallery, the artist additionally exhibits in Sweden with Wetterling Gallery.

However discovering feminine gallerists near residence in Jemma Hickman and Alice Workman, who additionally understood the pressures of juggling motherhood with a profession, was a boon. The pair opened their gallery in Might 2023, in a former Methodist church off the fashionable excessive avenue in Bruton, which has gone from rural backwater city to cultural vacation spot and agency favorite with arty Londoners in lower than a decade. That is largely all the way down to Hauser & Wirth, which launched a gallery and store at Durslade Farm in 2014.

Away from the blue-chip chutneys and cheeses, there’s a thriving grassroots scene rising in Bruton and its surrounding space. Because the pandemic, the UK artwork world has turn out to be barely much less London-centric, with a big variety of artists, writers and gallerists transferring out of the town—although Soul-Grey was forward of the curve, transferring to Devon in 2016.

Right now’s slower, extra thought of tempo fits the artist, who says she is now aiming to make ten “profitable” work a yr. On the time of writing, her Bruton present had nearly offered out (costs vary from £2,500 to £25,000). “Though final yr financially was a shock, having had two actually profitable years, now that has settled for me and I’ve survived it, this surroundings is far more healthy,” Soul-Grey says. “I’m now doing issues on my phrases, and I really feel significantly better.”

Alexis Soul-Grey: Reminiscence Play, Bo Lee and Workman, till 8 March