Grace’s artist statement:

 

Her artistic practice is largely situated within the tensions between repulsion/attraction and the public/private; through bodily representations these boundaries are explored as reciprocal relationships between the body, objects, and production. There is consistent focus on the ‘private’ body as symbolic reflection and agitator for the ‘public’ body - the societal and historical corpus - and how these things directly affect each other. In this sense, the bodily is often utilised to question whether it can be a catalyst to engage a kind of mass “visceral empathy”, incited as a key universally shared experience that can be harnessed to as a way of entering into socio-political dialogue.

​

Currently her practice is focused on ideas and ideals of green space, explored in terms of how it performs socially; particularly in the cordons that designate space, who erects these, and how these are internally mirrored. She is also interested in the wider connotations of the romanticised pastoral, ideas of the absurd, and the milkmaid, who is regularly conjured as a character with which to explore these idealised notions through. Here, the fetishised notion of the milkmaid is loaded with ideas and ideals of the female, fertile body, female labour, and ‘feminised’ notions of labour. There is also the tension of sexualisation and repulsion that is simultaneously evoked by milk as bodily fluid and sustenance, and recent developments to rewrite the taboos around milk and its industrialisation.

​

Instagram: @everything_must_go_project

Instagram: @50ml_oh_de_toilet

Website: gracehigginsbrown.com