Cameo

Lucy Cade (b. 1980, London, UK) was educated at Oxford (BA Classics, 2003) and City & Guilds of London Art School (MA, Fine Art, 2023), as well as Turps Art School. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, recently with Rise Art x Glennfiddich (also documented online and in Luxe magazine); in her duo residency exhibition (curated by Mollie E. Barnes) at Clovermill in the Netherlands in 2025; at Three Rooms Gallery in London in her self-curated group show ‘Doubles & Triples’; and in 2026 as part of the group show ‘Flow’ at Seager Gallery, She was shortlisted for the Jackson’s Painting Prize in 2021 and was awarded a DYCP grant, also in 2021, for a painting project in response to her experience of postnatal psychosis. She has paintings in collections internationally, including the home of award-winning UK interior designer Harriet Anstruther, featured in House & Garden, May 2026.

Lucy Cade’s paintings and drawings nostalgically inhabit the realm of female experience suggested by classic Hollywood film, film noir, the Gothic, the advent of photography and the long 19th century. They can be seen as portraits or even self-portraits. Her drawings employ a variety of multimedia – biro, inks, collage, handmade paper – to develop imagery from photographic or cinematic sources, often functioning as stepping stones to large-scale paintings. These works imaginatively recreate the world of a photograph or film, entering into and playfully altering its components to reflect her lived experiences, and the environments or situations in which she finds herself. In the paintings alla prima brushwork is combined with graphic annotations and evocative found substrates to create subjective biographies of her figures.

Portraiture and film narrative become a vehicle for – and expression of – human connection in her work. Oval frames are chosen as more human shapes than rectangles or squares; they also have a sense of corner-less continuation, both physically and historically, evoking oval portraiture from ancient Roman cameo brooches to Victorian family photographs and their idealised portrayals of women. Working from a visual research archive of female experience taken from film, art & literature, she evokes a nostalgic, dreamlike world, uplifting her female protagonists.

The recent body of work continues to explore the capacity of the oval cameo to express the historical aesthetic legacy of the presentation of women in art and culture. The oval both confines (gravitating around and ‘possessing’ Cade’s women) and offers a safe space in which to express strong emotional states.

Different painterly registers are at play: in some works the graphic annotations of ovals and crosses (Noughts & Crosses) play out around the figures, a simple yet extremely limited game expressing the confines of binaries such as male and female, in relation to female Hollywood actresses in the Hitchcock era.

Cade often chooses overlooked female artists and academics through which to expand the notion of portraiture. For example in ‘Magnolias’ she bases her expanded portraiture on sculptor and poet Nina Cust (1867-1955), in particular Cust’s poem ‘The Magnolia Tree’, a reflection on cycles of nature and the persistence of hope in the face of suffering.

Whilst not portraiture in the traditional sense, the work seeks to delve into the lives and choices of women from the past in a deeply subjective and personal way, bringing their female legacy into the present tense.

Website: www.lucycade.com
Instagram: @lucycadeartist