Lucy Cade Lincolnshire, United Kingdom

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Lucy is a painter and educator. She completed an MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2023. Recent shows include a guest artist slot in the Young Masters Art Prize exhibition at The Exhibitionist Hotel, hosted by the Cynthia Corbett Gallery; a group show with Stretch, a collective of artist-mothers at Somers Gallery, London.

My subject is female portraiture, with an emphasis on portraying subjectivity, agency and the transformative potential of extreme emotional states such as psychosis. Employing film imagery, I redeploy the look and feel of cinema and its associated histories of stereotypes and narratives to interrogate the depiction of women. I paint on an oval ‘cameo’ shaped support to allude to the historical tradition of female portraits as sentimental keepsakes: however the women I portray don’t seem in the mood for being ‘kept’, instead asserting moments of difference and divergence.

My light-touch wet-in-wet use of paint suggests the seductive qualities of film, yet the cool, almost monotonal palette distances us from the experiences being represented. I paint wet into a thick underlay of saccharin pale pink or blue, which enhances the sentimentality of the cameo shape. More figural than figurative, these marks can be seen as performing the uncanny: the ‘trace of trauma’. The painterly touch is tender but slippery; the images are fragile and slip from the gaze, oozing into pure paint.

I often paint women undergoing mental distress; however, as images interspersed from different moments in a range of films, they suggest a personally resonant network of recollections, reflective of an embodied experience of mental illness, even a coping mechanism, expressed and validated. They aim to give voice to a range of experiences, viewpoints and emotions.

Physical structures traditionally used in religious contexts - folding screens, draped materials and immersive interiors like those found in churches - continue to appear in my work, as well as associations and imagery with female religious figures such as the Virgin Mary.