Grace Crabtree: Elemental Drift
Grace Crabtree is an artist working in buon fresco and egg tempera, finding in these traditional techniques a way to draw connections between the earthy, elemental materials of stone, sand, and pigments, and the terrains she explores, drawing in particular from the coastlines of Dorset and Cyprus. The paintings, depicting fragments of figures and landscapes, are often grounded in an experience of walking or swimming through a place, while also drawing from historic or mythic narratives woven through the landscape.
Over the past year, Grace has been immersed in fresco painting, a medieval and Renaissance technique used for creating wall paintings, usually in religious spaces, which has largely faded from use. In the buon fresco technique, the image becomes an integral part of the surface. Pigments, suspended in water, are painted onto a layer of wet lime plaster (fresco, fresh) and absorbed. As the plaster dries over hours and days a chemical reaction of carbonation takes place, binding the pigments under a layer of crystallised lime, and so the painting becomes stone. Since the fresh plaster will begin drying out over the course of a day, this medium necessitates a careful preparation process followed by a short, concentrated spell of working.
As a recipient of an Arts Council England DYCP studio and research grant for her project, ‘The Art of Fresco’ (2022-23), Grace attended a specialist fresco course at Bosa Art School in Sardinia, and since then has been continuing her work to fold this ancient medium into a contemporary painting practice.
Drawing from a year of investigations into the alchemical art of fresco, as well as research into the forgotten world of English medieval wall paintings, Grace will be exhibiting her experiments with this medium, and other works also inspired by the landscapes of West Dorset and further afield.
“I am interested in working between scales, exploring landscapes, seascapes or interiors at the vantage point of the human eye; and then delving deeper, below the earth or imagining the invisible as visible; humus and mycorrhiza beneath the ground; geological epochs exposed by a cliff face.”
“Working with fresco has meant a year of sustained material engagement, with lime, sand, earth and mineral pigments. The imaginative potential of the complex, alchemical process of fresco has partly inspired the subject of some of my paintings – depictions of rocks, earth, water, or the body held in crystallised colour suspension as the image becomes stone.”
Grace Crabtree, 2023.
Grace Crabtree (b. 1997) studied at the Ruskin School of Art (2016-19) and has since exhibited in several group shows across the UK, and been on artist residencies in France, Portugal and Cyprus. She has also participated in Turps Art School’s Correspondence Course (2020-22; 2023-24). Last year, Grace was a recipient of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant for her studio and research project, ‘The Art of Fresco’.