Grace Wood
Grace Wood
(b. 1992, Murwillumbah, New South Wales. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Grace Wood is an artist who primarily creates collage-based installations. Her work frequently dissects and comments on the internet archive, elitism in art history, and conventional displays of contemporary photography.
Wood uses various materials to construct her works, including metal, wood, vinyl, fabric, carpet and paper. She prints images onto fabric, flattens vinyl onto walls, changes digital images into silk and transforms photographic prints into wearable items like scarves and shirts. Wood says:
‘My process involves sourcing and accumulating a large amount of imagery from various sources, scanning and digitising as required, then grouping images thematically and aesthetically to make large collages made up of many different images.’
Slide, 2023, is a new commission created for Melbourne Now that comprises several large-scale digital collages created predominantly from the National Gallery of Victoria’s photography archives. Printed on a combination of materials and suspended from the ceiling, the six works build on Wood’s explorations of images that engage deeply with the spaces in which they are situated. As Wood has said, when removed from its context, each image is examined as an idea, a utopia, an index or map, a vehicle for interrogation of itself.
Wood graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2014. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, with shows at the Hellenic Museum, LON Gallery, West Space, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Gertrude Glasshouse, Benalla Art Gallery, MARS Gallery, Schoolhouse Studios, BLINDSIDE, Bus Projects and c3 Contemporary Art Space, among others. She has also won several awards, including the Australian Centre for Photography Award.