Lucy Cade
In the Sanatorium, oil on canvas.
Lucy Cade (b. 1980, London, UK) studied Classics at Oxford University for her first degree. Whilst there, she spent many evenings in the life room at the Ruskin, and later completed her studies in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes. She is artist-in-residence at Leicester Contemporary, where she is exhibiting with InFems Collective in ‘No Reserve’. She has exhibited extensively online, most recently in ‘Euphoric’, an exhibition by womxn artists curated by Josephine May Bailey; also IRL at Modern Art Oxford, and ING Discerning Eye. She was shortlisted for The Alpine Fellowship Visual Arts Prize in 2021 and was a semi-finalist in the ‘Big Art Challenge’ on Channel Five.
Lucy's painting stems from an awareness of her femininity and the history of representation of women in art since ancient history. Her background in Classics informs her work, which is rich in Classical allusion. Her paintings portray women but not in the sense of portraiture so much as avatars of particular mental states or emotions, set in imagined places or landscapes of the mind. Her recent work explores her mental illness after the birth of her children. She was recently awarded an Arts Council Grant to make paintings about this experience. Within each painting her style is mostly naturalistic but sometimes edges closer to abstraction and expressionism. In her paintings she articulates the anguish and elation of psychotic states but also touches on the political status of (female) psychiatric patients, preyed upon by self-seeking or indifferent caregivers in a male dominated healthcare system.
