William Hine is pleased to present Ghost Light, a solo exhibition by the Devon-based artist Alexis Soul-Gray on view from 18 September to 1 November, 2025. 

The origins of the assembly of disassembled bodies in Alexis Soul-Gray’s exhibition Ghost Light lie in found photographs, children’s book illustrations, vintage sewing and knitting patterns, embroidery transfer outlines and the like. Often things begin as a mock up, a physical collage rooted in a process of seeking, finding, printing, cutting, blowing up, and sometimes projecting. Vestiges of this process remain in the fragmentations and superimpositions that build through her paintings’ constituent parts. It allows Soul-Gray to gather before her a set of traceable social, cultural, and emotional visual referents. As her paintings metabolise them, they metamorphose into elusive representations of people, times and places, near and far. The death of her mother continues to materialise through certain recurring motifs – here in the form of a horse, there as a Christmas cactus – the like of which Zoë Mandleson has described as being ‘surrogate forms’ or ‘vocational substitutes’. Collage allows Soul-Gray to pick away, indirectly, at attachments that are emotionally resonant, while protecting herself from the transparency that is required of us elsewhere.

Soul-Gray works by a process of tumultuous material aggregation and effacement. She seeks out figuration for its ability to connect and abstraction for its ability to liberate, verisimilitude for its ability to show off her skill, and confusion for its ability to recreate the disorientating sensation of living. The sensations that recur, then, are tethered to her life experiences, but at the same time she feels what she calls ‘a complete disconnect from my body’. This is where detachment, inherent in the process of collage, becomes integral. Nothing in an Alexis Soul-Gray painting is given unconditional acceptance; everything is subject to a potential future addition, partial erasure, overhaul or outright obliteration lending her paintings a vulnerability, a spatial and emotional bewilderment.

The centre piece of the exhibition, Ghost Light, the final scene (2025), is a stage-like bacchanal of amateur dramatics. An anachronistic motley of performers – jesters, dancers, fairies, mime artists, dolls, pixies – dressed up, made up, acting out, acting up. Stockings, tights, ruffs, tunics, romper suits, and upper hose are the dressings of theatrical poses struck, enacting a gamut of bodily emotions: fingers point accusatorially; cheeks draw near conspiratorially; upper bodies withdraw, affronted; chins jut out defiantly; eyes widen in fear? In shock? In disbelief? The emotional charge of the troupe – part-human, part-animal – is mercurial. Gesticulating wildly, all caught up in the dramas of their invisible internal worlds, the narrative of their encounters is, on the whole, unknown.

Soul-Gray’s work is filled with the resuscitated reproduction of parts. She picks at the bones of memory and found imagery, shuffling through a cast of figures to give her access to a universe of past and future possibilities. It is a kind of autopsy. This allows her to see for herself the new potential relationships and subjectivities which emerge from looking and looking again. Here are her ragbag of real, mythical and fairy tale characters, embodiments of the most basic, most complicated human emotions: desire, regret, grief, anger, frustration, intimidation, subjugation, fear. Here they are plucked from their points of origin and resituated, a means to investigate or orientate or better understand or work-through or accept, or defy. Rehomed in her paintings’ elsewhere, individuals regenerate, hybridise.

Afterlives animate Soul-Gray’s work, like the ghost light of theatre, from which the exhibition and its centrepiece are named. In theatre, a ghost light is used to describe the use of a single bulb to illuminate a stage when it is unoccupied. The custom, it is said, began as a safety precaution, soon becoming a superstition to ward off mischievous spirits and/or appease resident ghosts. Soul-Gray keeps the light on for past lives, those fictional characters, authored illustrations, anonymous models, women and children to whom she somehow relates and whose presence she resurrects. Unsurprisingly, these emotional attachments are never straightforward but blighted by contradiction: attraction and repulsion, admiration and shame, love and violence.

Text by Lizzie Lloyd.