‘I found energy from somewhere very deep’: artist Alexis Soul-Gray on navigating the gallery scene through grief and motherhood

Based in Devon with two young children, Alexis Soul-Gray is forging a career on her own terms. Last week the 44-year-old artist opened her first solo exhibition with Bo Lee and Workman, a relatively new gallery in Bruton, Somerset, which picked up Soul-Gray after London’s Simon Lee gallery folded in 2023. The closure came at a crucial moment in the artist’s career.

“It was heart-breaking. I was joining this great gallery and I’d taken on a bigger studio. But, just as I was due to have a big solo show, they went into administration,” Soul-Gray says. Fortunately, the artist was able to divert most of her paintings to another exhibition at her Los Angeles gallery, Bel Ami.

Now, she is showing eleven new canvases in the Bruton gallery, including Last Breath. Soul-Gray created Last Breath while studying her postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art in London as a mature student. Though graduating from the RCA marked a high point in her career, it also capped a particularly difficult time in her life. Soul-Gray’s mother died by assisted suicide, after being diagnosed with cancer, when the artist was just 25 and still studying at the Royal Drawing School. “It was a fast experience, she died in five months,” Soul-Gray says.

As a consequence, much of her work “comes from displacement from a grief experience”, as Soul-Gray puts it. “I was proud of my mum, although it was extremely painful. But what I experienced after was a very destroyed family. A family that had been taken apart. I very much felt orphaned because my dad wasn't in a good place. It was literally like a cut out family.”

Cut outs often appear in Soul-Gray’s work. She began making collages during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic and now they form an integral part of her practice. Other times, figures are left intact, such as the head and shoulders of a young girl Soul-Gray sourced from a magazine in the cobalt blue painting Spring has Come Early and it’s as if the Season Marks my Sadness.

Found images of children often serve as the starting point for the artist’s work. The Horse Whisperer (2024) started from a photograph of a group of young children posing next to a chained bear that Soul-Gray bought on eBay. “I do not know where they are, but they are supposed to be having fun,” she says. “I will quite often be drawn to an image for reasons my conscious mind is not always immediately aware of—in this instance it is the bear and the children’s unease that is relevant, because I remember seeing a chained bear on holiday as a child and feeling a deep sense of sadness.” The horse head, meanwhile, is symbolic of her mother. “In my memory she is always with horses,” Soul-Gray says.

Becoming a mother herself presented all-too familiar challenges for the artist. “I did find it quite hard. I wouldn’t say motherhood was a [creative] catalyst for me, because I felt very much penned into that life and suffocated,” she says. “I felt like I had several years taken from me through grief and then motherhood, and that I had to find this energy, which came from somewhere very deep.”

Finding her place within a gallery system geared towards expansion and productivity, often to the detriment of artists’ mental health, was an added pressure. “It’s quite hard to come back from motherhood and find that urgency within the gallery system,” Soul-Gray says. Alongside her Los Angeles gallery, the artist also shows in Sweden with Wetterling Gallery.

But discovering female gallerists close to home in Jemma Hickman and Alice Workman, who also understood the pressures of juggling motherhood with a career, was a boon. The pair opened their gallery in May 2023, in a former Methodist church off the trendy high street in Bruton, which has gone from rural backwater town to cultural destination and firm favourite with arty Londoners in less than a decade. This is in large part down to Hauser & Wirth, which launched a gallery and shop at Durslade Farm in 2014.

Away from the blue-chip chutneys and cheeses, there is a thriving grassroots scene growing in Bruton and its surrounding area. Since the pandemic, the UK art world has become slightly less London-centric, with a significant number of artists, writers and gallerists moving out of the city—though Soul-Gray was ahead of the curve, moving to Devon in 2016.

Today’s slower, more considered pace suits the artist, who says she is now aiming to make ten “successful” paintings a year. At the time of writing, her Bruton show had almost sold out (prices range from £2,500 to £25,000). “Although last year financially was a shock, having had two really successful years, now that has settled for me and I’ve survived it, this environment is much healthier,” Soul-Gray says. “I’m now doing things on my terms, and I feel much better.”

• Alexis Soul-Gray: Memory Play, Bo Lee and Workman, until 8 March