In tandem with is a monthly short interview series with interesting artists and art people. This month, we spoke to Grace Lee, a painter who lives and works in London. Lee's soft, eerie works evade easy interpretation. Like little windows into another world, they tug at assumptions and unravel our routines of looking. Lee trained at Goldsmiths and the Slade School of Fine Art and has exhibited in the UK, Italy, Thailand, and China.
Where do you find inspiration?
The start of an idea isn’t so much something I find as it is something that accosts me on the street. Those instances get logged chronologically in Microsoft OneNote and eventually start clumping together until something more structured starts to form out of loosely connected thoughts and observations. When it comes to the nitty gritty, actually having to wrestle out a painting from the list of assorted notes, puns and associations, that’s the kind of inspiration I have to work for. I hunt for it in the evenings, usually armed with Google image search and the lasso tool in Photoshop. Being a relentless obsessive helps, I think.
What is the best gift you’ve ever given?
The gift of my presence to all those in my life
What charges your creative batteries?
I always find visiting galleries to be a restorative process if I’m stuck, even if the work on show is nothing like what I’m working on, and a well-written accompanying essay never goes amiss. Anything done well, and in its most essential form, reminds me that it can be done, and maybe I’ll get there one day. I’m lucky that there are more shows in London than I can keep up with, so I’m never far from a charging outlet.
What’s something giving you hope right now?
I think I’ve just found the perfect solution for organising my socks.
What’s a mistake you’re glad you made?
I think I’m too chronically cautious to really lay any claim to mistakes, there’s nothing I haven’t accounted for in my vast decision matrix, but one thing I wanted that I’m glad I didn’t get is doing my undergrad at Slade. Having pined for Slade for the better part of two years, I was rejected after interview and forced to take solace at Goldsmiths instead. Their approach to teaching has moulded my approach to painting, as something more conceptual than formal, which was a good place for me to start at the time. Not many people there wanted to talk much about painting, and it turns out neither did I. There was time for that later, when Slade finally relented and accepted me onto their MA programme, but my heart will always be with Goldsmiths (for exposing the 1% margin of error in my matrix). But then every decision is in service of the person you are now, because they are exactly what made you.
Grace Lee's exhibition "Love and Theft" is open from 24 April - 31 May 2025 at HUXLEY-PARLOUR, 3–5 Swallow Street, London W1B 4DE
