Alexis Soul-Gray

eiklid / rusten is pleased to present Motherlines, a solo exhibition by British artist Alexis Soul-Gray. This marks the artist's first solo exhibition in Norway and her debut presentation with the gallery.

Soul-Gray (b. 1980, UK) creates deeply layered paintings that explore memory, loss, and maternal lineage through an innovative practice combining painting, collage, and unconventional material processes. Working from her studio in Devon, the artist transforms found imagery from vintage knitting catalogues and domestic manuals into emotionally charged surfaces that hover between abstraction and figuration.

Motherlines presents a suite of new paintings that trace the artist's maternal genealogy, a lineage marked by hereditary cancer and early deaths. The exhibition takes its title from Soul-Gray's exploration of the emotional inheritance passed from mother to daughter, examining both the artist's experience losing her mother to assisted dying in Switzerland and her own navigation of motherhood while grieving.

The works in Motherlines are characterized by their archaeological layering and surfaces altered by household chemicals, turpentine, bleach, and sink-unblocker, which create unpredictable effects evoking cellular structures and disease. Figures appear buffeted by invisible forces, half-drowned beneath obscuring surface tides. Anonymous characters sourced from 20th-century ephemera populate the canvases: girls performing, making gestures to please mother, or on the cusp of womanhood.

Soul-Gray is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (MA Painting, 2023) and Camberwell College of Arts. She has received two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants and was the overall winner of The Delphian Open in 2021. Her work is held in the permanent collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and has been exhibited internationally at Bel Ami (Los Angeles), Wetterling Gallery (Stockholm), The Arts Club (London), and Bo Lee and Workman (Bruton). Recent press coverage includes The Art Newspaper, Financial Times, Forbes, and Plaster Magazine.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by writer and curator Catherine McCormack, which explores Soul-Gray's practice through the lens of maternal archaeology, grief, and the search for a visual language that can express what remains beneath the symbolic order.