“Welcome to GRAVITY, an exhibition of works produced since 2019 when I substantially changed my practice, stopped painting and focussed on drawing, sculptural assemblage, textile works and collaborative short films.

I’m deadly serious about what I do. I also find a lot of it funny - two intrinsically linked perspectives. Just before he died, just after Putin invaded Ukraine, my Dad, who’d had Alzheimer’s for a long time - a weird, awful and often poignantly funny disease - asked me if I could go and talk to Putin as I was a ‘Serious Person’ who should be listened to. Dad really meant it. I said I was just an artist and probably couldn’t get that close to Putin but Dad was sure he would listen to me. Dad’s last act was to go out into the field opposite where he lived to try and make weapons out of fence posts and to exhort the sheep to help him fight the Russians. It was March and cold and he took to his bed with pneumonia and that was that. I thought it was all very intentional even if he couldn’t have articulated it. He’d had enough.

Bed is, I suppose, a bit of a tribute to the final Alzheimer’s years, much of them spent in Dad’s bedroom where I would sometimes have lengthy conversations with him over the top of a broadsheet while he was completely naked. It also reminds me of a recurring dream I had as a kid when I floated around in a tall room full of hammocks and sleeping children. The light was hazy, a bit like it is here in the South Chapel. These blankets have had many lives of sweat, tears, love and comfort and they’re a bit itchy, smelly and stained from it all.

A lot of the work I make is bodily and the reaction of disgust to some of it strikes me. Why do we find ourselves disgusting? To me, bodily things both describe and counterbalance what is inside our heads, what happens in there, and also how we behave in reaction to the world around us. My brain is very active at night which can be annoying. It can also be productive and some of the works here try to describe the link between the mental and the physical being, and night and day, male and female, light and dark, brain and gut and the multiple layers that are perceivable within one thing, be that object, idea, word, material or action.

I like making work with low value stuff. I’ve been collecting objects and materials for years with no fixed idea of how they will end up, until they end up doing something. On the whole I navigate my way around by play and intuition. It can be a long, latent process, hopefully producing one or several aha moments over time. These sudden understandings can go on for years - I mean, the work is never entirely fixed and can take on new meanings in different contexts for ever, as, for example, the Chapels inject their essence and meaning into the work when it is installed here.

Drawing is central to my practice and I have spent extended periods making one small drawing a day since 2019. The first two years of these drawings can be followed chronologically in TODAY and SPacejUNK: books which were also physical exhibitions at SVA in 2020 and 2022. I have brought about 160 recent drawings to GRAVITY. This regular practice has altered everything for me, fundamentally influencing all of my work through their immediacy, freedom, commitment, and not too much thinking.

For GRAVITY, a word implying weight and seriousness, presenting this exhibition in a place where people crossed from life to afterlife, from the physical to metaphysical, surrounded by graves, I’d like to suggest the inherent and necessary balance between what is serious and difficult and the importance of lightness and even humour. 

In the book accompanying the exhibition, I’m very lucky to have two brilliant texts by Dr Emily Lucas, my (both laughing) collaborator. and Dr Paul Harper, whose essay is adapted for the June edition of Good on Paper. They both know me and my work well, writing in response to our lengthy conversations, bringing insight, analysis and humour into the process of making and of negotiating an art practice,

Paul Harper also wrote a text for mine and Anna Cady’s seven projection work Richard installed here in the Chapels for Stroud Film Festival 2024. You can read this text via the QR code in the North Chapel by our works Ectoplasm and Unravelling which sit alongside Globus, also filmed by Anna with audio by my son, Harley Grellier. I should probably offer a trigger warning for Globus but you’ll probably have a look either way. 

Thanks to Anna Cady for playing with my head and to Paul Grellier for always climbing the ladders. Special thanks to Stroud Preservation Trust for the use of the Chapels of Rest and for the work they continue to do renovating and conserving these wonderful buildings.”

Nick Grellier 2026