Today we’d like to introduce you to Grace Worley.
Hi Grace, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born and raised in the Cleveland/Akron area in northeast Ohio. I went to Wittenberg University as an undergrad and majored in studio art with a concentration in drawing. I was simultaneously enrolled in the education program and so I also earned a K-12 visual art teaching license for the state of Ohio. After I graduated in 2020, I started a master of fine arts program at Ohio University in southern Ohio where I am a third-year grad student expected to graduate in May of 2023.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It definitely has not been smooth sailing over the years. As an undergraduate student, I struggled with finding the time to continue making work and being passionate about what I am producing because I had a full course load and teaching hours in local schools every week which made it easy to feel burnt out. I remember waking up at 4:30 am every morning to work on my drawings and then staying up until midnight making work after I got home from school and finished lesson planning for the next day. It taught me a lot about perseverance especially when the pandemic started during my final and most stressful semester. This led to my decision to attend graduate school to get my MFA degree. I knew I wanted more time to be fully dedicated to refining my practice and focusing on who I am as an artist. This was also something I wanted to do for my future students; to fill in the gaps that I knew I was missing from my undergrad curriculum and to learn more about the art world and opportunities for artists of all ages.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I work in a hybrid painting/drawing format using liquid charcoal on stretched canvases in a variety of sizes ranging from 3″x3″ to 60″x84″. I reflect on the role of art objects within conversations about memory, sentimentality, nostalgia, and specifically, how they can be used for extending dialogue beyond the self through depictions of the natural world based on my own changing relationship with the world as we digitize our lives. Through the process of visually describing details of places I recall having played a role in my experiences within the natural world, my work brings forward glimpses of reconnection as an opportunity for viewers to question and/or become aware of their changing relationship with natural environments. The larger-than-life scale of much of my work is intended to consume the attention of viewers and invite them into a space where they discover the endless details of nature. This scale, in collaboration with a technical process that blends both the techniques of representation and abstraction together through the grayscale of charcoal, is intended to give a sense of place, a sense of familiarity, tied to some sense of memory once had or held with a natural space.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Some of my favorite childhood memories stem from the times spent in the big maple tree in the front yard of our house. My brother and I would climb that tree every day, our mom would take our pictures in it every fall when the leaves turned red, we would bring snacks and eat in the tree, bring our neighborhood friends over to hang out in the tree, draw with chalk on the tree trunk, etc. It’s such a simple memory but memories like this fuel my work as an artist.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.graceworley.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/graceworley.art/
