December 2023 / January 2024
Artist Grace Crabtree – who painted this issue’s beautiful cover image – is looking forward to her first solo exhibition, which opens at Bridport Arts Centre (BAC) in January. We caught up with her to learn about her creative process and find out what inspires her…
The Covid pandemic changed all of us, at least a little, and for Grace Crabtree that change revealed itself in her work.
Grace was born in Bridport and went to school at Colfox before taking an art foundation course at Falmouth University and then a degree in fine art at the Ruskin School of Art, part of Oxford University. She now has a studio at her partner’s house, deep in the Dorset countryside near Netherbury, and divides her time between there and her family home in town.
“During the lockdowns, I spent time wandering the countryside around my studio,” she says, “and I found myself drawn to painting the landscape more, rather than the figures and abstract pieces I’d concentrated on before.
“That time of lockdown isolation, spent in nature, also cemented my interest in traditional techniques, in working with local materials and using what the earth provides. At the Ruskin, one of my tutors introduced me to the process of making my own paints – particularly egg tempera, made from hand-ground pigments and an egg-yolk binder – and that engagement in materials has become very important to me. And then it was on a trip to the Roussillon ochre mines in 2017, where first I gathered pigments and experimented with making my own paints.”
Grace graduated in 2019, then undertook two residencies, one in the south of France, then a second in Lisbon, where she spent a month before the pandemic hit.
“The residencies gave me two very different experiences,” she says. “First I was in a small village in the French countryside, exploring the landscape of hills, caves and castles.
“In Lisbon, the bustling Portuguese capital, I joined a residency programme called Zaratan, and worked on a series of figurative charcoal drawings inspired by a 15th-century polyptych [series of panels] by Nuno Gonçalves.” Grace showed two of these drawings in a 2021 multi-disciplinary event at Bridport Arts Centre called Return of the Natives 2.
Inspiration from medieval frescoes
Last year Grace spent five weeks in Cyprus, where her exploration of the coastline and experiences of the island’s culture and mythology also came to inform her work. She also took a course in Sardinia, as part of an Arts Council grant to learn the techniques of fresco painting. She cites mural and fresco painting as one of her greatest influences – she wrote her degree dissertation on the subject – and much of her recent work uses fresco techniques.
“I’ve been visiting medieval wall paintings in Sussex and Essex churches,” she says. “Some of the churches are tiny, but they have the most extraordinary frescoes. The Lewes Group of wall paintings, for instance, are very simple because the priory didn’t have much money, but they are made with local materials – red and yellow ochre, lime white and carbon black. The effects are amazing, and the colours are warm and glowing.”
Grace has been experimenting with these techniques in her own work, using ‘buon’ (true) fresco, where pigment is applied to fresh plaster that’s still damp. She has produced a number of small pieces on terracotta, plus some larger ones on marine plywood covered with hessian and then plastered with lime mortar. Together with some sketches, large-scale charcoal drawings and egg tempera paintings, these will be on display at her first solo exhibition, Elemental Drift, which is at Bridport Arts Centre’s Allsop Gallery in January.
A host of other skills and interests
Grace is an accomplished writer and is interested in film, too. She is involved with Chasing Cow, a group of artists and filmmakers – mostly recent graduates – who make narrative films and produce a quarterly magazine called Matter Out of Place (MOOP). Last year she directed an adaptation of ‘The Wind Blows’, based on a short story by Katherine Mansfield and shot here in West Dorset. Chasing Cow launched the film last year and Grace has recently shown it at an “intense academic conference” in France, where she spoke about the adaptation process as a form of translation.
She also writes for MOOP and is subeditor for STIR magazine, produced by the national economic development co-operative Stir to Action.
www.gracecrabtree.co.uk