To mark this year’s Norwich Pride, we were thrilled to award two FREE solo exhibitions to incredible artists from the local LGBTQ+ community! Lisa Richards will take over the Front Room Gallery: Lisa is a UK-based abstract artist whose work explores vibrant colour relationships and playful shapes through acrylics and mixed media. Working on paper, canvas, and wood, her pieces range in scale but most often sit within a more intimate format. Driven by hyperphantasia - a vivid imagination that brings colour and form to life - Lisa creates from both inner vision and everyday surroundings. While rooted in abstraction, her paintings sometimes reveal elusive figures, lost or unsure, hovering at the edges of recognition. Her intuitive process varies widely: some works resolve in a single sitting, while others unfold slowly over weeks or months, until the next stage becomes clear. She has learnt to trust the slow ones, as her mind processes ideas well in the background. After early art training that discouraged abstract expression, Lisa’s creative path detoured through roles in administration, a library, and even cardboard box design. She returned to painting via a part-time MA, reclaiming her voice with a brighter, more joyful palette than in her earlier, moodier work. A late-diagnosed neurodivergent, Lisa embraces her neurospicy brain as a strength, allowing for deep visual exploration, layered meaning, and a unique perspective on colour. Lisa lives and paints in Norwich, UK. Her research interests include neurodivergent visual perception and the emotional resonance of colour. "I am absolutely blown away to have been selected for this solo show. When I enter group shows, I tend to choose small pieces that I can easily carry to and from the venue, so the opportunity to show my larger work as well is really exciting. I hope that by filling this space with my paintings, people can feel immersed in colour and really see the cohesion in what I do, along with the narrative between pieces. The title of my exhibition, cmy, comes from the colours I use: cyan, magenta and yellow. The acronym will be familiar to anyone involved in printing as CMYK, though I don’t often use black in my work. We tend to think of red, blue and yellow as the three primary colours with which you can mix anything, but several years ago I was introduced to the idea of swapping out red for magenta, and my paintings suddenly gained a new vibrancy. Having previously used a lot of red (paint, clothing and hairdye), I now tend to avoid it. Even my rainbows use pink instead!