Gray trained as an actor but later returned to visual art, adopting painting. Working on wood board and canvas, often with tactile, impastoed brushwork, she paints subliminal, transportive scenes that capture the flux and flow of life, with images referencing movement – a butterfly, swans, a pair of kitten heel shoes, a couple dancing. Pieced together they might form a narrative, with a beguiling female character at the centre.

Actor Aimee Lou Wood is Gray’s Champion for The Wick. She said: “Lucie and I attended RADA at the same time and I was mesmerised by her immediately. She struck me instantly as ethereal and magnetic – as though she is channeling some higher plane – whilst also being deeply human and grounded. It’s like air, earth, fire and water are all working together in equal measure. I feel this so profoundly through her work. It’s otherworldly and magical whilst capturing universal feelings that everyone can access and recognise from their own lives. The ache of love, yearning, loss and the warmth of togetherness, joy and the everyday captured in a way which enchants. I love her paintings because they feel like life itself – full of beautiful contradictions: playful yet epic, hopeful yet heartbreaking. It’s such a gift to be able to convey the happy sadness of the human heart and this is what she does so well.”

“A lot of my inspiration is from books”, Gray says, which explains the narrative quality to her work and their sensibility for storytelling. “Annie Ernaux’s writing is incredibly inspiring – I feel like her writing permits me to create work from my female perspective and really make space for it.”

She also points to Kafka and books on psychoanalysis as a rich source for expanding her work and translating her ideas into images. There is also a sense of inherent, endless playfulness in Gray’s paintings, a nod to Paula Rego – “my greatest artistic inspiration especially the playfulness in her pieces and the sense of her inner child existing in her work.” While drawing on all of these things, Gray constantly returns to the female experience and the female figure. Previous works have contemplated sex and seduction with a female gaze, while her next body of work, which she will begin in the studio this summer, focuses on sisterhood.
 
At Hilda, one painting still remains after the show. It’s a portrait of a female figure in a carmine red suit, wearing the same pointed black kitten heels that appear in another painting, she holds a white feather. Both demure and dreamy, feminine and furtive, it recalls Ernaux’s words in Happening: “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”