Oona Grimes
Weed Killer: Three Chapters of Medea Syndrome

Oona Grimes Etruscan children: Medea syndrome 2024. #27 75 x 110 cm. Stencil drawing & collage on paper.

 “The work always seems to be about monsters in the domestic margins, the tyranny of complicit silence & child abuse - all wrapped in comic strip language.”

Weed Killer comprises of three chapters:

1. Stencil drawings on black paper where the monster-healer mother murders her children.
2. Coloured pencil & collage on drafting film conjures the bruised ghosts of the dead children.
3. A short film spins the yarn of absolute laws - the three Fates of thread, measured life and final severance.

 A leaflet featuring a commissioned essay by Tess Charnley will be available during the exhibition.

Oona Grimes is a London-based artist who merges drawing, clay and film to create a world peopled by the Unseen and the Unlovely. Her work reflects a deep obsession with the learning and losing of language, fusing Commedia dell’arte with comic strip aesthetics.

During her 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at the British School at Rome, Grimes compounded Etruscan tomb paintings with Neorealist cinema. The resulting films, were mis-remembered re-enactments that physically integrated her into the frame.

Grimes graduated from Norwich School of Art (1986) and Slade School of Fine Art (1988). She was awarded the Bryan Robertson Award in 2022 and elected to the Royal Academy in 2023. Recently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.

Tess Charnley is a writer and curator based between Cornwall and London. Her writing has been published across leading art publications including Elephant Magazine, Burlington Contemporary, Art Monthly, this is tomorrow, Ocula and the peer-reviewed journal Anthropocenes — Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. She was also a contributer to Prime: Art's Next Generation, published by Phaidon. She is currently working on a publication on the late artist Richard Nott, which will be published by Sansom & Company in September.