CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Lucy Ray

*News Updates*
Lucy Ray has been announced a finalist in Fishers Ghost Award with her piece 'A forest clearing, dog, and bathtub'.

Lucy Ray is a Melbourne artist raised in Yeppoon, on the traditional land of the Darumbal People of Central Queensland, living between Australia and Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Creating narratives set in strange and mysterious environments, populated by out-of-place figures and uncanny objects, Lucy Ray’s highly detailed graphite drawings blend the real and imagined to capture a sense of being an outsider, of being alone but not alone and to bridge the devide between the ordinary and the uncanny. Depicting the natural world and small everyday things, recurring themes explore ideas of loneliness, nostalgia and notions of sonder and liminality. Through a process of meditative mark-making creating a richly textured dimensionality, her images become a sort of peculiar mirror through which the viewer is invites to contemplate more than what is seen.

Artist Statement:
As an artist, I am intrigued by the concept of liminality and the emotional and psychological experiences accompanying it, how liminal spaces can give a sense of the permanence of the past, present, and future. One of the emotions I seek to evoke in my work is a sense of strange nostalgia. A feeling of disorientation and uncertainty as we grapple with emerging new realities. At the same time, I seek to convey a foreboding mood, reflecting the tension and anxiety that can accompany times of transition, where the old is passing away, and the unknown is beginning to emerge.

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Artist profile:
Ray has a Diploma in Fine Art and a Bachelor Degree in Interior Design & Built Environment. She has worked as an illustrator, digital artist and textile designer and returned to her fine art practice in 2017. Since moving part-time to Abu Dhabi in 2019, she has engaged with the art community both in Australia and internationally, exhibiting and hosting workshops in Dubai and Melbourne.

She has been a finalist in the Fishers Ghost Award, the Delphian Gallery Open Call Competition, the Dobell Drawing Prize, the Lethbridge Landscape Prize, the Gosford Art Prize and the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award and was awarded both the Works on Paper Prize for Brunswick Street Gallery’s Fifty Squared Art Prize and the Art Room Award in Tacit Art’s Still Life Prize. She was a finalist in the 2023 Flinders Lane Gallery Emerging Artist Award and exhibited in Exploration 23. She will be travelling to the USA to undertake a Vermont Studio Center residency in December 2023.

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Media Highlights

A sign, fence and horses 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
61cm x 51cm
$1,800 AUD

A carpark,bull and light well 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
36cm x 28cm
Sold
Sold

A chicken, living-room, candle and skylight 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
36cm x 28cm
$870 AUD

A clearing, curtains and goat 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
36cm x 28cm
Sold
Sold

Trees, horse and tent 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
38cm x 26cm
$870 AUD

A forest clearing, dog and bathtub 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
36cm x 28cm Selected for the Fishers Ghost Art Prize 2023
Reserved

Two cats, a booth and TVs 2023
graphite, cold wax mounted to panel
18cm x 13cm
$620 AUD

A pair of hounds, a stone table, empty bowls, a highway median strip 2022
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber
70cm x 120cm , framed in Victorian Ash
$6,000 AUD

An overgrown clearing, two ravens, a mirror, peaches and pool chairs 2022
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber
80cm x 60cm , framed in Victorian Ash
$3,000 AUD