Who is Grace?
In 2020 Grace graduated from Chester University School of Art with a First Class Honours degree in Fine art. Her powerful and huge figurative paintings in her Final Show, The Identity Series, invite you into her world to meet its strange inhabitants - more or less human - clearly on the way to the same anarchic party…
Grace's art challenges views of disability...
In 2010, aged 17, Grace’s life hung by a thread after a serious traffic accident resulted in severe brain injury leaving her with interrelating disabilities and a neurodivergent view of the world. Her work often uses these challenges to challenge viewers, to reflect her resistance to the reductive label ‘disabled’ or the disorientating sense of fractured self 24/7 care engenders. She is inspired by artists who express inner feelings through portraiture (her recent starting point was Bacon’s ‘Screaming Pope’ series). Tschabalala Self’s work contributed to her understanding the powerful tension that childlike form in painting can create when themes are adult, sometimes sexualised.
