Grace Clifford is an artist from the Birmingham and the Black Country. She is led by her intuition and lived experiences. Grace likes to use everyday objects to consider their purpose and the personal associations that we may have with them. Whilst using these readymade objects as a starting point, Grace finds metal work and casting to be an important technical and contextual process, being raised in a key industrial area and her dad being a factory worker.
Grace is particularly interested in exploring working class identity and understanding why certain objects and experiences can be attached to class.
Is pride and hope just a coping mechanism for being working class? And is hope a construct to make us break our backs our whole lives?
Bronze Pub stool
Casting the ordinary bar stool, a representation of class, ritual and community belonging, over a 9-month working period of casting and fettling, bronze was initially a labour of love, but became to stand for the love of labour, a monument to community.
Hi Grace. Please don’t bring your friends to the pub.
A glass sculpture in the form of a pub window made in response to a received text, this ‘warning’ made me feel excluded and ashamed, it reminded me of ‘no high vis/sportswear’ signs seen at certain pubs and other public places, subtle yet deliberate restriction.
Pickled fivers
The pickled fivers is a readymade comprised of around 60 quid in vinegar, it has been in preserve since early 2020.
“I had been thinking about the fiver as an object for a while, it’s this thing we have all seen, use and hold but I feel that ‘we’ don’t really view money as a physical object, especially as physical money is slowly but surely disappearing. the phrase ‘money is no object’ which is interesting, money is definitely an object.”
