She says: “Alexis’s work is an intoxicating mix of deeply personal experience, psychological and linguistic theory, mass media images and universal themes that I think we can all relate to. Her studio feels like an archive of female identity, stacked with images of women and children she finds in old magazines, knitting catalogues, strangers’ old photo albums and more. She has a keen eye for the uncanny and the kind of visual suggestions we subconsciously internalise. These she weaves together with her own traumas and joys, creating collages that Freud himself would admire for the projection, displacement and suppressed memories they hint at. From all of this comes her extraordinary artworks – painted, stripped back, and repainted over years before she is satisfied. She is a profoundly meaningful and original new voice in contemporary art.”

Adds Soul-Gray: “My practice is an attempt to understand and to reconcile the relationship between the found image, painting and personal loss. I am drawn to the staged format of studio photography, the faked bucolic backgrounds, unnatural lighting, perfect clothes and forced grins. My works are often described as a communication between myself and my mother. Little girls and women of childbearing age are removed through processes such as tearing and cutting, rubbing, scratching and bleaching. I allow them to commune together. I seek comfort in the repeated act of their reunion. I become like a mother hosting a playdate. They act out their memories, hopes and fears in a safe environment that I monitor and close down if (as my mother used to say), ‘it’s all going to end in tears’.”

Describing the act of cutting out the children from their first contexts of family gatherings, she adds: “There is violence in this gesture but also the intention to care and to repair.”

As well as her solo exhibition at The Arts Club and her concurrent group exhibition at Bo Lee and Workman in Somerset, called The Guts And The Glory, she is working towards a solo booth at Milan’s Mi Art Fair in April with Bel Ami, Los Angeles, which is publishing her first monograph in early March. 2024 is set to be a big year for this rare talent.