GRACE CLIFFORD_THINE IS THE KINGDOM_2025_INSTALLATION IMAGES
THINE IS THE KINGDOM: Exhibition text (pdf)
Thine is the Kingdom / 18 January 2024 / ABINGDON STUDIOS PROJECT SPACE
Grace Clifford (b.2000, Birmingham) mainly works in sculpture and installation. She has recently been thinking about desire and suffering, chocolate, the sacred, the profane, plastic water bottles, metal, God, wheat, chicken, milk, mourning something that can’t die, horses and vitality.
Since October 2024, Clifford has undertaken a number of site visits to Blackpool accumulating material and generating ideas through intensive periods of observation and reflection.
Clifford is fascinated by rituals and reflections surrounding blue-collar trade, directly informed by her lived experiences alongside personal and shared heritages. She works intuitively and in response to the environment around her, embracing and allowing subconscious feelings to weave into physical outcomes.
She is particularly interested in the looping, cyclical nature of the work and leisure relationship in which Blackpool exists. For Thine is the Kingdom, Clifford has sought to site herself within this cycle directly, rather than observe it from a far, embracing a looping pilgrimage from the studio to Blackpool and back again.
Thine is the Kingdom takes its name from the Lord’s Prayer. A repeated doctrine intended to affirm power and righteousness. Grace has been seeking patterns and connections that hark to our collective devotion to labour and the false notion of freedom in our pursuit for pleasure.
Grace Clifford is a young artist from Birmingham. Her work looks at lived experiences and representations of working-class identity informed by her own background and wider socio-political issues. Grace draws inspiration from the built environment and the everyday and makes sculptures that offer propositions for understanding our place within society. Grace’s work is intentionally accessible in that the objects she selects are recognisable and familiar; she aims to make sculpture more accessible to broader audiences and doesn’t want any viewers to feel alienated when experiencing her work.
Recent exhibitions and projects include: England is a Forest, Sluice (Vernacular), 2024; Community, Birmingham (group), 2024; Gatherings, SET Woolwich (group), 2023; An Elastic Continuum, S1 Artspace Sheffield (group), 2023; Ones to Watch, Judges Commendations (2023) Avalon Café, London (group), 2023; Delphinium, Rag Gallery (group), 2023; It’s a Joy to be Here, Working Class Creatives Database x 87 Gallery (group), 2023; Extra Time, Women’s Euros X village (Group show and publication), 2022; Going Up In The World, Art House, Wakefiled (solo), 2022; New Art Gallery Walsall (Group), 2022; Wet Dovetail (Solo), 2022; Ones To Watch (Group), 2022; Round Lemon (Group), 2022; Pineapple Black x Working Class Creatives Database (Group), 2021; Magnetic North (Group), 2021; Ikon for Artists (Group), 2021.
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