Blue Shop Gallery presents
Lucy Ray
‘I’ll have to remember it differently’
Gallery 2
7th - 31st October 2026
PV Wednesday 7th October 6-8pm 2026
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm or by appointment
Lucy Ray (b.1983, Yeppoon, Australia) is an Abu Dhabi based artist, she has a DIP in Fine Art from TAFE Queensland and a BBEnv in Interior Design. This year, she began an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
She has attended several residencies, including The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, New Mexico and the Vermont Studio Centre, Johnston, Vermont.
Her work has twice been selected for Blue Shop Gallery’s annual Works on Paper exhibitions and their 2024 group show ‘When the Curtain Falls’ as well as at this London Art Fair 2025. This year, she had her debut solo show, ‘For Those Who Came in Late’ with Flinders Lane Gallery.
Working across various media, from graphite on paper to oil on panel and pastel on canvas, Ray’s work encompasses reconstructed compositions drawn from the experiences and memories of places she has inhabited or visited, resulting in images that evoke a strange nostalgia. Collectively, these works construct a world characterised by familiarity, unease, and tension, subtly alluding to events whose occurrence remains ambiguous.
More recently, her practice has incorporated influences from American genre painting and the Arts and Crafts movement. Focusing on surface, texture, and traditional, labour-intensive methods. This slow, deliberate process responds to contemporary culture’s emphasis on speed and fast consumerism, foregrounding the value of the handmade.
‘I’ll have to remember it differently’
These works are not necessarily part of a series, but rather a thread being followed. How memory and reminiscence can shape perception and create a longing for something that never existed.
Blending the real with the imagined, Ray’s work captures the subtle energy of a place or moment. With shadows as the only hint of human presence, what first appears still or abandoned gradually opens into a more complex terrain, where memory and quiet foreboding begin to gather.
Across these works, Ray explores the thresholds between past and future, belonging and estrangement, memory and invention. A quiet tension runs through these works, an impression that something has occurred, or is about to occur, just beyond the frame. Her images convey the strange nostalgia of remembering, the unease of not knowing, and a peculiar intimacy that is strangely familiar.
hello@blueshopcottage.com for all catalogue requests.
‘Gravel, a shadow and flowers’
Lucy Ray
18 x 14cm
Oil on panel
2025
‘Trees, a field and car’
Lucy Ray
45.5 x 60.1cm
Oil on panel
2025