Coming soon! murd : chapter one take two  2020

Oona Grimes is a born and bred London scribbler and draw-er—a devout flattist with a love of pattern and all things paper and bookish, from Japanese woodcuts and Windsor McKay to graphic signage and packaging; tartans stolen from a Lorenzetti blanket or cartoon detail thieved from Roman wall paintings.

You’re lured in spite of yourself, in spite of not knowing what the shady characters and disjointed hieroglyphics represent... Isn’t this what Grimes is seeking - a way to notate a reality that can’t be determined or resolved through narrative or catharsis? — Cherry Smyth

My drawings are a celebration of the absurd, a transformation of ordinary objects and a simmering consommé of fact and fiction, an ongoing series of parallel worlds. They are an investigation into language, beginnings and ends of it, learning and losing it, neurological case studies, Alzheimer’s, slippage and mis-memory. Clay is the in-between bit—the instinctive making-ness that fills in the gaps.

Now tanglehead has nothing to say to brickface. Characters once locked in the personalities of hierarchical position must change as the power of speech is lost. —Cherry Smyth

Grimes is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art London & The Ruskin School of Art Oxford University. In 2018 she was the Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School at Rome and in 2023 she was elected as a Royal Academician.