Grace Adam
Grace Adam is an artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, much of it made for places outside art galleries. Her MA in Fine Art is from Chelsea College of Arts, where she was also a Fine Art Fellow. She is a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts on the Material and Spatial Practices programme, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Alongside her own practice she has taught at the Royal Academy of Arts, Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Whitechapel, Chisenhale and the Serpentine, and writes workshops and continuing-development material for other educators. She co-created and co-presents The Art Channel, which makes independent filmed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions with institutions including Tate, the V&A and the Royal Academy of Arts.
She has held residencies at St Giles in the Fields in Covent Garden, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Budapest, and HMP Gartree, and spent six months as Artist in Residence at Walpole Old Chapel in Suffolk. Her solo exhibition Knap was shown at Mandell's Gallery in Norwich.
Artist Statement
I work across drawing, painting, sculpture and installation - with paint and graphite, as well as unconventional materials, and from observational to abstract.
I make objects and temporary interventions which I often locate outside gallery settings. I am particularly interested in our environments; how we build, negotiate and use them. Histories are worn in the fabric, alterations, additions to structures.
How do we use public, shared and domestic spaces? What and who are they are for? I am interested in exploring the possibilities for reconnecting, celebrating, questioning the places and spaces we use; in noticing; in agency.
The fetishisation of objects manifests itself in gallery, museum, religious, shared and domestic contexts-even retail spaces. Forming small or sprawling collections, they are telling portraits of lives and preoccupations. Exploring the role of ornaments, tools, furniture is a not only a way to investigate the intentions of the maker, but to trace changes in 'taste'; materials, status, ways of making. What is celebrated, what is kept?
Uses, materials, contexts change. Always in a state of flux, meaning is formed and reformed. The relationship between the readymade and mass-produced or commemorative objects; between luxury, ephemera, trash and ordinary, is rich and fascinating.
Work
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam
Photo: Grace Adam