I wanted to show you guys the interesting work of my friend Grace Cross, she’s a fine artist who lives and paints in Cape Town and I think her work is damn cool. I’m not very good at reading too much into art, I just know what I like, so I’ve included Grace’s artists statement so that you can understand her body of work a bit more through her own words.
– My artistic practice interrogates the crossroads of ‘African Identity’. I tell stories through images, which can be taken as things to come, things that have arrived or things that have already been devoured in the great chain of being. My work creates an imaginary frontier that asks to be traversed and delineated; reclaiming and monumentalizing a new bastard race. I use the corporeal materiality of paint and matted animal fibre to explore personal and historic heritages as signifiers. The reviving language of myth joins together a polyglot of the real world’s cultures and traditions within the painted narratives; unborn, living, dead and hybrid creatures intermingle with the ordinary. Violence and birth are synonymous examples of life on the canvas; a severed baby floats in space, a bird’s beak pries open a pregnant egg, a masticated meal is gobbled by a wound-like mouth. The binaries of the unobtainable and the finite, the centre and the border, the converged and divided are all devoured in the microtopias created within my paintings, seeking to intrigue an audience into questioning their own traditions. I endeavour to imbed my work with a sense of playful heritage, spawned identities, and humorous metamorphoses situated in a wondrous discordant Eden.
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