With two decades of experience in creating site-specific public commissions, Grose makes highly individual work which intrinsically interweaves a sense of place, environment, history, community and local materials to be found at the site.
Site Specific Commissions
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Bitch Hazel
Bitch Hazel
Bitch Hazel was a year long project in woodlands on a Devon Farm.
The sculpture was made and redressed for each season entirely from materials found within the woodland.
The work acted as a focus for thought about how the farm community used the woodland. It was made with long-time friend and collaborator, Naomi Leake.
Bikelights
Bikelights
Everybody knows Apollo: a flashy hothead with a gold chariot; wants everybody’s attention; everybody spinning around him; dancing to his tune; the boy racer with what you might call universal magnetism. Most only have eyes for him, even though he ends up burning them to their sockets.
La Luna is different: altogether quieter; glides around silently, her feet not seeming to touch the ground; she doesn’t care what most people think. The only one she’s interested in is Earth. She moons around him, never quite daring to approach too close, but endlessly flinging out the folds of her sparkly black dress to try and catch him in her drapes. He doesn’t notice her of course. He just keeps circling Apollo, one of the many satellites, and not even the closest to the seat of power. Still, his solid rock calm is impervious to La Luna’s beseechings. She circles around him, trying to get his attention: “Look at me, look at me! Come to me, come to me!”. With her fancy long gown (darker than midnight and scattered across with translucent jewels of white - some so bright you can hardly look at them) and her crazy hat of bright globes and crescents that turns gently in the wake of Apollo’s passing.
Earth’s iron core is unmoved; only his blue skin ripples and sighs towards her.
Wigg Island Visitors Centre
Wigg Island Visitors Centre
Wigg Island is land, between the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, reclaimed from pollution and the manufacture of destruction to create a Community Nature Reserve.
After long conversations with the local community, and careful observation of the site, Grose made three pieces :
Lining Up the Ducks and Waders - etched life-size examples of the rich variety of birdlife into the glass wall of the building;
Birdsong for Wigg Island - a collaboration with composer Stuart Jones on a sound work which starts with birds that you would hear at dawn in January and finishes with a December evensong (both these last two pieces with the practical aspect of helping visitors to get to know the birds they see and hear);
and finally Legacy – etching local people’s memories of the site into the slate floor inside and outside the building.
Ely Eel Trail
Ely Eel Trail
‘Ely’ means the Isle of Eels. The small city and the cathedral’s inception are intricately linked to the fish with one of the most fascinating life cycles on the planet.
Grose made 5 pieces for the Ely Eel Trail: bronze waymarkers to lead people around the trail; etched the life cycle of the eel into the glass of the city’s contemporary gallery; created an octagonal tower (like that of the cathedral) of Eel Glaives based on examples in local museums; created a huge living willow eel trap and a 10 metre mosaic (from pieces of pottery dug up in the park by the BBC’s Time Team) next to a playground and found a recipe purportedly to be written by Oliver Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth to be written onto the surface of a circular bench made to go around a tree outside their former house.
River Severn at Bewdley
River Severn at Bewdley
Faced with the challenge of making work to be installed within Bewdley’s flood defences, Grose created two pieces in etched stainless steel, one reflecting the rivers name as it meanders through time and place, and the other recalling the cargos that used to wait on the river wharf to be transported across the country.
Felixstowe Coast Path
Felixstowe Coast Path
From an immersive year of walking a five mile stretch of the Suffolk Coast, conversations with a great number of people, workshops with local schools and local history research, Grose was commissioned to make 3 works: a set of waymarkers reflecting the town’s history and ecology; a map of the coast path which incorporates local people’s stories and memories; and a book, detailing in the conceit of a week, the artist’s experience of getting to know the town.
Hunstanton Sensory Garden
Hunstanton Sensory Garden
Old Wives Tables brings plants which are recorded as having grown around Hunstanton for hundreds of years to the centre of the garden and raises them to a level that makes them easily accessible.
The plants were chosen not only for their long links within the local environment, but also for their scent, texture and taste. Details of each plants historical culinary, cosmetic and medicinal use are etched into the table surface.
The Wild Wallflowers incises images of more locally occurring plants into the surface of a ring of bright white stones around the two dark green Holme Oaks at the centre of the garden.
The names of the plants are also detailed in braille plaques set next to the etched images.
