Garth Gratrix OFFICIAL PAGE

Official documentation 💦 Garth Gratrix Shy Girl...() 2020-Present - custom beach towels on bronze powder coated steel bars. Hung nine inches off-straight. - plinth in colour 'Tempt Me' - Dimensions variable Edition of 9. Installation view @the_bluecoat #liverpool #uk Huge thanks to all the team at The BlueCoat and @francis_smythe for inviting me to exhibit. Ahead of their new adventure to @mostyngallery 🎉👌 And to meet the new Curator @amy_stev0 whilst documenting touch, rearrangement and affect during deinstall. Thanks to @grundyartgallery for the loan of Shy Girl...(Campground, Beside the Seaside) that was acquired into their permanent collection back in 2021. Amazing to exhibit alongside incredible artists: #jademontserrat @davidshrigley @bruceasbestos @chestertenneson @ffionevanstextiles @ivykalungi @sufeamono @clovisvosser @bensaunders.art @_carlawright @danielseankelly #lauraaquilina Thanks to @creativetourist @artinliverpool @culture_liverpool for features. Images by @benjaminnuttall 🙏👌

I’m still processing and enjoying the moment. Sat 6th July saw the launch of my solo exhibition, Flamboyant Flamingo feat. Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Derek Jarman @grundyartgallery @aceagrams @bpoolcouncil . It’s been a balancing act over the last 12 months and pieces within the exhibition have moments where the formal, minimal and abstract ethos is enlivened or complicated by the inclusion of personal and emotional lived experience of loss. A formal-frolic is the best way to describe it. Seeing the space transformed through exposing the gallery to natural light again really takes the visitor to a unknown resort like destination. . I will be posting details during the run of the show, but encourage visitors in person to this beautiful gallery to enjoy a moment of resorting and playful furtiveness. . I’m sharing three images depicting the installation of new sculptural works in Gallery 2, caressed by walls painted in the colours ‘Radiant’ and ‘Peekaboo’ More Soon :) Check out Grundy Art Gallery website for listed events, talks, performances. . “Never give up on your living ambitions” . I’m loving memory of Janet Lesley Brickles aka Smumpy (1957-2024) 🙏🫶 . 📸 Benjamin Nuttall @benjaminnuttall . Copyright of Garth Gratrix. . #soloexhibition #commission #contemporaryart #sculpture #installationart #bronze #textile #coast #uk #blackpool #garthgratrix #grundyartgallery #colour #queeringminimalism #queerformalism #formalfrolic #queerabstraction #queer #lgbtqia

Installing Shy Girl…() @the_bluecoat has been a reminder that some artworks don’t stay still — they breathe, negotiate, recalibrate in relation to who enters the room. This series of nine beach towels, each partnered with a bronzed steel bar sitting nine inches off-straight, keeps teaching me that the smallest deviation can hold a whole world of intention. Nine inches: apart, together, away, repeat. A measurement that began as a moment of queer self-awareness, has become a framework for how these works occupy space. They lean, slouch, slide, and drape with a shy assertiveness — soft, but firm in their desire to claim room. They start each day stacked on a plinth painted in colour 'Tempt Me' — an eggshell whisper that sits somewhere between invitation and hesitation. From there, everything is up for renegotiation. Visitors are encouraged to touch, fold, move, and reposition Shy Girl. Every gesture becomes a new configuration, an ongoing horizon line where the formal and the frolicsome meet. Watching people engage with the work has been its own choreography: careful hands, curious glances, the slow reveal of colour pairings pulled from DIY paint names that merge domesticity, humour and tenderness. Each display becomes a new sentence in a language built from colour swatches and sideways glances. A beach towel seems like such a simple thing — familiar, everyday, tied to rest, leisure and coastal escapism. But it’s also a boundary marker, a place-holder, a declaration of “here I am.” It absorbs, supports, frames the body and its desire to take up space. In this installation, it becomes a soft architecture — one that holds all the contradictions of being at once bold and shy, precise and playful, exposed and held. These images track the work through its settling-in: the first unfurling, the moments of neatness and chaos, the ways colour behaves differently depending on how a visitor has last touched it. Nothing is final. Everything is proximate, responsive, quietly alive and queered. Grateful to everyone who’s entered the room with curiosity, and to those who’ve helped hold the space with care. Thanks also to @grundyartgallery for the collection loan (image 2)

I’ve been revisiting studio pieces that haven’t yet been exhibited. Things that linger and keep reflecting back at me while I play, procrastinate, potter and plan. Paint and colour feature in my work a lot. The piece pictured is one I keep returning to Cottage by the Sea, Shhh sea water, emulsion and plywood (2024) I use the line as both a rule and a prompt. Usually measured, repeated and held in stripes that organise colour and space but never quite settle. The work and I are constantly orientating ourselves on and off the surface. These paintings move between clarity and disruption. Lines are followed, crossed, softened or drift into blur and beyond. The paint holds shape and form while also bleeding into the plywood, negotiating its own altered state and vibrancy. I like how the precision of the painted lines gets complicated by the natural grain of the wood beneath it. Like my larger wall paintings, I’m interested in where queer decisions and marks linger. How they stay within systems and structures even when painted over. There’s a kind of hauntology in that for me. Things hiding in plain sight. A deviance within the cleanliness of minimal ideas. Colour acts like a quiet guide. Suggesting possible narratives or ways of moving through the work without insisting on one fixed reading. Titles and measurements become suggestive. Little innuendos or cues rather than clear answers. I’m interested in how someone might recognise something in the work. A rhythm, a structure, a memory, a metaphor, and then move beyond it. Letting it become something more expansive, intuitive and unresolved.

Highlights 1. Gunsmoke City, 2023 by Kath Ashill @kath_ashill Gunsmoke City was a film installation and theatre set of a fake cowboy village. Exhibited at Greenman 2023, and then moved to a Swansea gallery setting, GS Artists, in autumn 2023 "Fresh from Green Man Festival, Gunsmoke City explores the narrative of a fake cowboy town based in the Swansea Valleys village of Seven Sisters. The location is an unlikely setting for the masculine idyll of the Wild West. Themes of the frontier and escapism are pushed through the imagery in the film and the set. Ashill plays the role of lead cowboy in full drag, offering a tongue-in-cheek critique of the Western genre and gender norms. The work was filmed at the original site of the cowboy attraction and features found footage and collected imagery of Gunsmoke City from local archives. The film also incorporates Ashill’s hand-painted animation. The performance score builds on a live performance (also titled Gunsmoke City), which the artist performed at Greenman Festival 2022. The work was commissioned by Greenman Trust and debuted at Greenman Festival 2023." 2. A Strange Light in the Woods, 2016 - 2026 by Robert Sherratt @artbyrobertsherratt Acrylic and canvas on wood. 3. Looming, 2026 by Ursula Leach @ursulaleach01 An oil on canvas of two trees looming out of the mist in front of a high hill. 4. Snake Charmer, 2022 by Garth Gratrix @garthgratrix Photographic print on pearlescent paper on aluminium. Documenting artists' editioned silk hanky works in titular colours. Created as part of the silk hanky code series ‘Camp-us’. Firstly commissioned by Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster Arts, and Arts Council England.

We’re excited to announce our new PhD candidate, artist Garth Gratrix🙌 @GarthGratrix will work with New Contemporaries and the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Teesside University @Teessideuni on a new research strand for the organisation, designed to strengthen how we support early career artists. We’re placing artists at the centre of everything we do, while exploring new directions for practice and development. We sat down with Garth to find out more. Read the full Q&A on the New Contemporaries website. “I’m particularly interested in non-linear and queer ways of understanding development—ways that allow for slowness, failure, pauses, sideways movement. Because that’s what it actually looks like, even if the structures around us often don’t recognise it. This feels urgent because so many artists are navigating precarity, multiple roles, and unstable conditions, while still being expected to produce, perform and progress. I want to explore how we might build systems that don’t extract from artists, but actually sustain them and consider them within cultural leadership and infrastructure.” #NewContemporaries #ArtistsChangeUs #Interview Images - Garth Gratrix by Timon Benson; Garth Gratrix, S/prayers, 2023, crop; Garth Gratrix, Flamboyant Flamingos, 2024, solo commission, Grundy Art Gallery, crop; Garth Gratrix, Voiles, 2023, collections spotlight response to Grundy Art Gallery permanent collection items, crop. This collaborative PhD is funded by Northern Bridge Consortium.

Get ready for a fabulous evening at the very first ‘We’re Still Here! History Club’ with the incredible Stuart Linden Rhodes, aka @linden_archives , on Tuesday 14th April, presented in partnership with @showtownbpl . A pioneer of documenting queer Northern nightlife in the nineties, Stuart’s beautiful photographic documentation of Blackpool was presented as part of the first phase of ‘We’re Still Here!’ back in 2022, where we saw seven photographs from Stuart’s archive of Blackpool exhibited at the @grundyartgallery . The show lasted for over three months, spanning from LGBTQ+ History Month to Pride Month, and reached over 10,000 people. Now, to kickstart the next phase of the ‘We’re Still Here!’ project, Stuart returns to Blackpool to share unseen images from his archive and tell the firsthand stories behind them in conversation with @garthgratrix and @hclaytonwright . Stuart will also give us access to the articles written and published between those years (1991 -1995), which give a fascinating glimpse into Blackpool’s iconic LGBTQ+ bar and club culture in the nineties. 🎟️ are FREE and available at the 🔗 When: Tuesday 14th April Time: 6pm-8pm Location: Showtown, Bank Hey Street, Blackpool, FY1 4TQ ‘We’re Still Here!’, the first permanent collection of LGBTQIA+ Heritage in Blackpool, is a project run by @abingdonstudios_projectspace . With thanks to @heritagefunduk and National Lottery players.

We’re Still Here! is looking to appoint freelance creative professionals to come and work with us on a distinct and exciting LGBTQIA+ arts and heritage project in Blackpool in 2026/27. We’re Still Here! will continue generating a community-built queer heritage collection, shaped by residents past and present. Building a team of community champions they will collect, archive and share oral histories and personal testimonies through accessible and creative means. We’re Still Here! will also map out Blackpool’s brilliant long-standing LGBTQIA+ history providing a framework for two major exhibitions running concurrently at @showtownbpl and @grundyartgallery in 2027. Deadline for Monday 5th January, 2026: • Project Coordinator • Community Archivist Deadline for Monday 19th January, 2026: • Evaluation Consultancy • Fundraising Consultancy Photos by Stuart Linden Rhodes aka @linden_archives . Image 1, 1992. Image 2, 1991. Design by @sarahferrari , colours by @garthgratrix . With thanks to @heritagefunduk and its players. We’re Still Here c/o Abingdon Studios, a project developed by @garthgratrix and @hclaytonwright .

During my @apexartnyc Fellowship in New York this year, I kept a Tumblr journal. Link in Bio 📖👀🔓 I've since created a FREE downloadable PDF for anyone who likes to print things off and sit with them under a soft throw with a cuppa and a cat over the festive break. I welcome any thoughts and or feedback on my writing / reflective research🙏 With thanks to @chestertenneson @mcrschart for my nomination for the fellowship 🙏

We’re Still Here! awarded £235k from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for an exciting series of public exhibitions in Blackpool in 2027. Abingdon Studios commissioned project We’re Still Here! is delighted to announce it has secured major funding for the continuation of a pioneering LGBTQIA+ heritage project. Drawing on their initial pilot in 2021, @garthgratrix and @hclaytonwright will continue generating a community-built queer heritage collection, shaped by residents past and present. Building a team of community champions they will collect, archive and share oral histories and personal testimonies through accessible and creative means. We’re Still Here! will also map out the town’s long standing LGBTQIA+ history, working with a historian and community archivist to research Blackpool’s brilliant history which will provide a framework for the two exhibitions in 2027, running concurrently, at @showtownbpl and @grundyartgallery . For the full story visit the Abingdon Studios website. Thanks to @heritagefunduk and National Lottery players. Photo 1 by @timonbenson at @theblackpooltower . Photos 2 and 3 by @linden_archives . #NationalLottery #HeritageFund

Blackpool-based artist Garth Gratrix’s work explores the relationships between working-class and creative culture, and draws inspiration from everyday objects and the seaside. ‘Shy Girl’ is a series of custom-made beach towels featuring various motifs referencing British seaside towns, working-class culture, and LGBTQ+ identity. They’re individually titled using the names of the paint colours, purposely selected for their flirty, innuendo-like names such as ‘Wink Wink, Cheeky Felicia’ and ‘Nice Tan, Mermaid Cheeks’. Gratrix has never shown ‘Shy Girl’ with the invitation to touch before, but has noticed that visitors instinctively want to touch or straight out the towels. In Just Browsing, you are welcome to pick up the beach towels and hang them from the rails, to neaten them up, create new shapes, and rearrange the order of them on the wall. Exhibition open Tue-Sun, 11am-5pm. Just Browsing is supported by @liverpoolbidcompany and @homotopiafest .

Documents of today's public interactions of Shy Girl...() at @the_bluecoat , Liverpool. I'm really enjoying the use of my rules and frameworks and how they are enlivened, complicated, or blatantly ignored by visitors. I'm feeling like I have a deeper and richer sense of the works material and spatial 'formal frolic'. So interesting just to bare witness to how some strewn, some replenish, some toss, some gather, some stack, some fold. People are sensitive, rebellious, sensual, domesticated and challenging in their willingness to participate with work made available to them for browsing and touch. Loving it and long may it continue into 2026 as part of Just Browsing curated by @francis_smythe With thanks also to @aceagrams and Shy Girl work/s on loan from @grundyartgallery permanent collection