Thomas Wray (°1990 Manchester) is a multidisciplinary British artist of Scottish and Italian heritage whose practice dwells in the space between the sacred and the everyday. Drawing on sculpture, photography, and installation, Wray examines the quiet power of objects—how they carry memory, belief, and emotion long after their original purpose has faded. His work engages in a subtle yet profound exploration of materiality, transformation, and the rituals that shape human experience. At the heart of Wray’s practice is a sensitivity to the spiritual potential of the overlooked. Working often with found and symbolic materials, he allows their histories—personal, religious, and cultural—to surface through minimal yet deliberate interventions. These material gestures form contemplative spaces that invite stillness, reflection, and presence. His is a language of restraint and resonance, where the devotional is suggested, not prescribed. Wray’s aesthetic is informed by both Catholic iconography and domestic familiarity, yet it resists nostalgia or imitation. Instead, his work navigates the charged space between reverence and rupture, where beauty and vulnerability are held in delicate balance. Through acts of recontextualisation, he challenges how we assign meaning, encouraging viewers to encounter the familiar as if for the first time. Themes of longing, sacrifice, and the divine echo throughout his practice, though never in dogmatic terms. Wray creates poetic objects and environments that operate in the margins—between the personal and the political, the earthly and the transcendent. His work does not seek to resolve, but to hold open a space for questioning, witnessing, and contemplation. In a world of speed and surface, Wray’s art invites slowness. It rewards attention not through spectacle, but through a quiet insistence on the unseen and the sacred that persists in the remnants of our material lives. His practice speaks not only to what we believe, but to how we believe—and to what end.
Education
BA (Hons) in Fine Art at the Liverpool school of Art - 2011
M.A Master's in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art - 2014
Erasmus program at the Accademia di Belle Arti Venezia - 2015
M.F.A Master's in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art - 2015
