Lucy Cade - The Supposition of her Existence

Lucy's Exhibition will run from Monday 10th May - Saturday 12th June 2021
Lucy will be available in the Gallery on Saturdays to meet and discuss her work.

Lucy is mostly self-taught, having studied Classics at Oxford University. Whilst there, she spent many evenings in the life room at the Ruskin, afterwards completing an art foundation at Oxford Brookes. ;The Supposition of her Existence at Stamford Contemporary Arts is her first solo show. Her paintings have been exhibited in group shows online, at Modern Art Oxford, at art fairs, as well as at ING Discerning Eye (2005). She was a semi-finalist in the ‘Big Art Challenge’ on Channel Five in 2004.

Lucy’s figures are avatars. Through them, she captures moments when we suddenly realise the illusory nature of existence and that consciousness is actually an empty space of being. We can read the uncertainty and vertigo of such a revelation, as the veil of Maya comes down. Her own meditation practice inspires her to notice and seek out these moments.

She presents painterly non-places, which amplify the emotional charge of their inhabitants. The paintings often capture a moment of hesitation or transition, and emerge from or recede into a pattern of lines. She rephotographs found photographic sources multiple times from the screen of a device.: this provides a starting point for colour reductions and textural confusions (moire lines).

The veiling/rippling is in part a reference to the material support the painter uses (a woven material, i.e. canvas), and to how such materials have been historically created by a female workforce. In looking, we recognise the ‘world-as-appearance’: only ever seen through a series of veils and foils, and the (often female) subject seemingly trapped in this experience. The viewer can feel the epiphanic, slightly troubled moments represented in my paintings as their own, raising concerns about the subjective nature of experience and gender.

They also allude to classical myth and pre-Raphaelite representations of women. In terms of style, the paintings present an inventive take on the work of artists such as Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter, who have also taken photographs and cinema as their source material.