Tell us about yourself, your medium and the main focus of your practice?
I recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, including a five-month stint at The Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. I make paintings which playfully negotiate the tension between the digital and the analogue. I’m intrigued by my own attachment to technology and the incessant need to refer back to various glowing screens for information (or out of boredom). Thinking about the inherent similarities between the flat surface of a smart screen and the surface of a canvas, my work explores the disparity between real space, pictorial space and virtual space in a world dominated by digital screens.
Over the last year I’ve been using the motif of the ‘swipe’ through my work — the greasy mark smeared across our screens by a language of swipes, clicks, flicks, taps and drags. I’ve collected a catalogue of these micro-gestures — recording which marks sent texts or tracking an unsolicited Facebook stalk… The resulting isolated marks are really quite beautiful, quite calligraphic. It’s the universal language of our Internet Age and I find a lot of joy in the fact that something so digital looks so painterly.
I’m also toying with gendered conceptions of the domestic interior and of colour. I often think about the traditional role of paintings as a decorative object for the home. A lot of my research examines the blurring of high-art to consumer culture, always with an emphasis on what’s ‘typically girly’. I made a series of paintings last year in 1960’s bathroom suite colours and I’m currently working from a new palette taken from Gucci’s Fall/Winter 2016 Runway.
What have you been doing since graduation - where could we have seen your work, what projects you've been working on and how you're finding life as a grad?
After ECA degree show and a group exhibition at Six Foot Gallery in Glasgow, I moved back to North London. I spent a few months working in arts communications but balancing my work and studio time with a full-time job was impossible. From my degree show I was lucky enough to be selected to show at RSA: New Contemporaries and have since been shortlisted for exhibitions in Leeds and Dundee, so I left my job to focus on the proposals for these shows. Thankfully it paid off, I’ll be exhibiting at all three next year.
I've set up a studio space in a barn and I’m getting back into the swing of making work! It’s been quite different having to generate new ideas in an isolated environment without other people to bounce off. Recently I’ve mainly been working on new material research. In my final year, I used a lot of wax and I’m getting really into casting. I’m playing around with a few different silicones and resins to work into my more sculptural pieces, as well as working on some digital fabric prints. There’s a lot of challenges that come with working in a new space and navigating a way to work without the luxury of college workshops and facilities. On the other hand, my power tool collection is growing by the day and I am really enjoying getting into new projects. Particularly ones that involve nail guns.
What's next, what've you got in the pipeline, what new things are you working on?
Right now I’m working hard to get a new body of work together to show next year. I’ll be exhibiting in X at Blip Blip Blip in Leeds from January 11, in RSA: New Contemporaries at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh from February 18, and in They Had Four Years at artist ran space GENERATORprojects in Dundee from May.
CHECK OUT MORE OF GRACES’ WORKS www.gracewoodcock.com
INTERVIEW by HANNAH SMITH
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