Bow Out,

Oil, resin and ribbons on wood, 160 x 90cm, 2025

Lucy Cade is an artist living and working in Rutland, UK.

Prior to achieving an MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School (Distinction, 2023) and taking part in Turps Offsite Programme, she studied for her BA in Classics & Art History at Oxford University. As well as her recent London solo 'Dancing to a Mirror' at Fitzrovia Gallery she has exhibited at Cynthia Corbett Gallery, Liliya Gallery and Terrace Gallery and was selected for Jackson's Painting Prize 2022. After receiving ACE funding in 2021 to explore her lived experience of postnatal psychosis through painting, she has focused on this area ever since.

The Dark Glass,

Oil on canvas, 20 x 30cm, 2024

The Dark Glass is a painting based on her study of Ingmar Bergman’s film Through A Glass Darkly, which charts the psychotic illness of the main female protagonist on a remote Swedish island. The oval cropping, as in much of Cade’s oeuvre, accentuates the emotional intensity of the work, capturing a chilling, yet moody moment of trauma through carefully considered brushwork. It also presents a contemporary contradiction in response to the historical sentimentality of the oval portrait in relation to women.

The Long Shadow of the Gothic,

Oil on linen, 90 x 55cm, 2025

Based on photos taken of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), The Long Shadow of the Gothic is a painterly representation of the legacy of the Gothic novel in Hollywood film noir, following Cade’s study of the genre in her own reading. She was particularly struck by the role of shadows and shadow selves, and their impact on female protagonists curious to explore their origins. In the films, this is evoked by the strong use of light and shade in the black and white medium of the time. In paint, the thick striated strokes and reduced blue and white palette give a sense of immediacy and the fleeting sense of shifting memories and emotions. In this sense Cade’s female protagonists are reclaimed as receptacles of history, both personal and cultural.

Folies a Deux (The Madness of Two) (1),

Oil on wood, 60 x 80cm, 2025

Part of a series of responses made on the theme of ‘doubles’ to the passionate friendship of the two female protagonists in Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures (1992).