‘Elevation’ 2025

‘Elevation’ was held at SOCIAL Gallery in the Salamanca Arts Centre, 10-21 July 2025. All works included were inspired by Tasmanian alpine landscapes, in particular Kunanyi.  In this exhibition I wanted to explore the possibilities of the collage works that I began making around 12 months before by tearing and cutting my linocuts and refitting them. I created some new linocuts for the show, but also created collages with them, with the intention of giving opportunities for visitors to discover the collage making process. Linocuts and collages where exhibited side by side so that visual references could be made between the two.

Central to the show was a ‘constellation’ of “Small World” collages, hung in a salon-style. I loved seeing the shapes ‘floating’ around each other and speaking to each other. The rest of the show was more traditionally hung, but interspersing collage and linocut.   The linocuts are a more pictorial representation of the alpine landscape, whereas the collages seemed to speak more of our experiences of it. 

Local arts writer, Andrew Harper has written about my work -

“Grace’s linocut prints are meticulous and breathtakingly complex. They are reproductions of the environs of the mountain that Grace now lives upon, but the rich intricacy is also analogous of an intricate life. In her myriad leaves and trees, Grace sees the arc and shape of her own existence.

… She takes her beautiful intricate prints and tears them.

They are no longer images of the mountain; they are something else. The images on paper are not end points; they are sites and material for more experiments. She tears them, changes their alignment, moves them, and she sees something new. She cuts away edges, leaving forms, still recognizable as lichen-tattooed rock from an alpine scene, but changed. The torn edges are not hidden; they show that this is paper, worked on and shifted, made into forms like islands. Grace takes the mountain and her interpretation of it and makes an archipelago, makes islands out fragments on paper, and it’s as if she’s making her own new place to be, or a map of the place she finds herself in, made of the fragments and the moments and the shape of her life, literal and allegorical. Grace makes maps, from the art she makes that she shapes and re-shapes and experiments with, making more art, making a space for herself. The works that emerge from this complex, deeply personal process are floating islands of calm wonder.”

You can see the catalogue of the show here.