What happens when the experiences that shape your life also become the foundation of your creative practice?
For Alexis Soul-Gray, painting is not simply a way of making images. It is a way of exploring memory, loss, identity and the relationships that shape who we become.
Alexis is a British painter whose richly layered works move between abstraction and figuration, creating surfaces that feel both intimate and expansive. Working from her studio in Devon, she creates paintings that explore personal history, maternal lineage and the emotional landscapes we carry with us.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, The Royal Drawing School, Camberwell College of Arts and Central Saint Martins, Alexis has received two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants and was the winner of The Delphian Open in 2021. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private and public collections, with features in publications including The Art Newspaper, Financial Times, Forbes, Ocula and Plaster Magazine.
But this conversation is not simply about career milestones.
It is about the much less visible process of becoming an artist — and continuing to be one through the realities of life.
Alexis speaks openly about the moments when her confidence was affected during her early artistic journey, and what happens when you lose your connection with the certainty you once had. We explore the impact of grief following the loss of her mother, and the long, uneven process of finding her way back to her own voice.
We also talk about motherhood and caregiving, and how those experiences have transformed not only the practical realities of making work, but the work itself.
At the time of recording, Alexis was also co-curating Declarative Language, a group exhibition at Amici Studios in Hastings bringing together women artists whose practices have been shaped by sustained caregiving within families of neurodivergent children. The exhibition explores how care, limited time, heightened attention and constant adaptation can profoundly influence artistic practice.
That idea runs throughout our conversation.
The circumstances of life do not simply sit around the edges of creative work. They become part of it.
Alexis describes making work in fragments of time, often at a kitchen table, while navigating the demands of family life and the realities of sustaining a practice financially. Rather than seeing those conditions only as barriers, she reflects on how they have sharpened her attention and changed the way she works.
There is also a powerful conversation about artistic integrity. Alexis speaks about the importance of staying close to what feels true, even when that means resisting external expectations or saying no to opportunities that do not align with the work she wants to make.
In a world where artists are often encouraged to make themselves easily understood and marketable, there is something quietly radical about protecting the complexity of your own process.
This episode is a conversation about endurance, but not in the sense of simply pushing through difficulty.
It is about adaptation.
About allowing your practice to change as your life changes. About recognising that creative identity is not something fixed, but something you continue to build through experience.
And perhaps most importantly, it is about returning.
Returning to the work. Returning to your instincts. Returning to the part of yourself that knows why making matters.
Now let me introduce you to Alexis Soul-Gray.
What We Learned from Alexis Soul-Gray
What stays with me from this conversation is the honesty with which Alexis talks about returning to creativity.
There is a familiar story we often hear about artists: the breakthrough moment, the defining opportunity, the sudden arrival of confidence.
But Alexis’s story feels much closer to the reality that many creatives experience.
A practice can become uncertain. Life can interrupt. Circumstances can change. The time and energy available for making work can shrink.
And yet the connection to creativity can remain.
What feels especially powerful is that Alexis does not describe these experiences as things she had to overcome in order to return to being an artist. They have become part of the artist she is.
The grief, the caregiving, the compressed time, the negotiations and compromises — all of these experiences have informed the way she sees, works and makes decisions.
There is also something important in her willingness to protect the integrity of the work. Not every opportunity is the right opportunity. Not every path leads closer to where you want to go.
Sometimes creative confidence is not about saying yes more often.
Sometimes it is about knowing what to say no to.
For anyone trying to build a creative life alongside the realities of work, family, responsibility or uncertainty, there is a reassuring message here.
You do not need perfect conditions to create meaningful work.
A creative practice is built in the middle of real life.
And sometimes the most important act of creativity is simply continuing to return to what matters.
