Grace (Gray) Winburne is a multidisciplinary sculptor from Houston, Texas working within the intersections of fatness and queerness in the contemporary landscape. They received a BA in Honors Visual Arts and Engineering from Brown University in 2021 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2024. Their work has been featured in spaces in Boston, Providence, Houston, and online. Recent highlights include Fresh Faces at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, The Winter Showcase at Till Art Wave, and an upcoming Thesis show with their MFA cohort. They also have experience in curation, including a project through Students Curate Students titled Party of One.
My experience as a fat and queer person deeply influences my practice and the way I move through the world. The way I process my own experiences and cultivate community around them is through a sculptural and socially-engaged art practice. I seek out both academic and interpersonal research in order to dissect the relationship between fatness and queerness, and investigate the parallels between those facets of identity. The specific areas of overlap - such as desirability politics, othering, and consumption of the body - are particularly rich to me, and inform the objects and installations I create. I utilize a kitsch, maximalist palette of color and texture to reference the history of “sloppy craft”, and challenge craft’s exclusion from the fine art canon.
I am creating a universe rooted in fat liberation and queer ecology. In the future I’m creating, the body is not a spectacle nor a subject of debate. There is no need to morph until you’re no longer subversive. In the work I develop, I aim to highlight joy and celebration of the self to combat the shame typically associated with living in a non-normative body. Joy and celebration are radical acts when they are antithetical to common thought. To be proud of your fat body in a typically fatphobic society is radical. To be proud to be queer in a typically queerphobic society is radical. To express love in this way, a self-love that threatens the insecurity that capitalism thrives off of, is radical. As I continue to develop what I make, the goal is to ride that line between comfort and discomfort. The materials I tend to lean toward are fibers, ceramics, and woodwork: all craft media traditionally associated with the home and domesticity. This is comfortable, soothing. Reckoning with the body and how we view ourselves and others isn’t an easy task, and shouldn’t be written off as such. It should be uncomfortable. It should cause some tension. These conversations make peoples’ skin itch, make them shift in their seats. I aim to create an environment that is safe to have those complicated feelings, and has a comfortable enough atmosphere to draw in even the most hesitant viewer.
email: [email protected]
instagram: @grayse
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