CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Lucy Ray

Upcoming Exhibitions

*News Updates*
Lucy Ray has been announced as a finalist in the 2024 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award
Lucy Ray has been announced as a finalist in the 2024 Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize with her piece 'A sign, fence and horses'.

Lucy Ray is a Melbourne artist raised in Yeppoon, on the traditional land of the Darumbal People of Central Queensland, and currently living between Australia and Abu Dhabi, UAE. Populated by out-of-place figures and uncanny objects, Lucy Ray’s highly detailed graphite drawings blend the real and the imagined, bridging the divide between the ordinary and the uncanny. Ray creates narratives set in strange and mysterious environments to capture a sense of being an outsider, of being alone but not alone. 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 invited to contemplate more than what is seen.

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.
Lucy Ray, Artist Statement

Learn about Cold Wax Varnish Technique

ARTIST PROFILE:
Lucy Ray holds 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 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2024, 2022), the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2024), the Fishers Ghost Award (2023), the Delphian Gallery Open Call Competition, the Dobell Drawing Prize (2023), the Lethbridge Landscape Prize (2023), the Gosford Art Prize (2022) and was awarded both the Works on Paper Prize for Brunswick Street Gallery’s Fifty Squared Art Prize (2022) and the Art Room Award in Tacit Art’s Still Life Prize (2022). She was a finalist in the 2023 Flinders Lane Gallery Emerging Artist Award and exhibited in Exploration 23. In 2023 she undertook a Vermont Studio Center residency in the USA.

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

JOIN PREVIEW LIST

Media Highlights

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

A room, a ram and rocks 2023
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
35cm x 27cm
$1,100 AUD

A room, horse and window 2023
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
35cm x 27cm
$1,100 AUD

A field, spools, and shadows 2023
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber pane
18cm x 13cm
$650 AUD

A field, power-lines, a shadow 2023
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
18cm x 13cm
$650 AUD

Mountains, an open plain, horses a roundabout 2023
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
42cm x 72cm
$1,800 AUD

Pool chairs and a shadow 2024
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
20cm x 20cm
$800 AUD

Two shadows, branches and bunting 2024
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
20cm x 20cm
$800 AUD

A waiting room 2024
graphite, cold wax on paper, mounted on timber panel
61cm x 91cm Finalist in the JADA PRIZE 2024
Reserved

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

A chicken, living-room, candle and skylight 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

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