Artist Statement
Adam at Contains Art SAW Creative Pathways Bursary Residency in 2016. Click here for the interview.
I explore painting, printmaking, and sculpture through portraiture, landscape, realism and abstraction.
Process is central to my practice, with each piece becoming an archive of impressions and fragments, transformed through material, colour, line, and texture.
Surfaces are constructed over time.
Excavated, scraped back, sanded, and reformed, these enable meaning to emerge through a sustained engagement with the materials and my intuition.
These cycles of making and unmaking allow material, memory, and time to converge, creating a dialogue between the hand, the surface, and the traces left behind.
I am interested in what has the potential to emerge through this physical and intuitive process: the unexpected marks, discoveries, and connections that develop as a work evolves.
For me, making is not simply about creating an outcome, but about remaining open to possibilities within the process itself. It is through this continual interaction between material, memory, and gesture that the work gradually reveals something beyond its initial intention.
Adam R. Grose is a Somerset-based artist, educator, and facilitator originally from Cornwall, working across painting, printmaking, and process-led creative practice.
Associated with CICCIC Taunton, Go Create Taunton, Arts Hub Gallery, and Orchard Gallery Taunton, he leads courses in creative methodologies and printmaking alongside a wide range of workshops across the South West.
His practice is recognised locally for developing confidence, risk-taking, and personal visual language, prioritising process over fixed style. Rather than operating primarily through commercial gallery systems, his work is embedded in sustained engagement with the local arts ecology, supporting emerging and returning artists across Somerset, Devon, and Dorset.
Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media, Grose’s approach is grounded in intuition, experimentation, and material inquiry. His workshops frequently attract practising artists seeking to extend and challenge their existing work.
The practice is deliberately process-led: built on experimentation, repetition, erasure, and risk. Works often remain open-ended—visibly unresolved, exploratory, and reflective of thinking in motion. Each piece functions as evidence of making as thinking, rather than the resolution of a predetermined image.
Rather than adhering to a fixed style or visual motif, the work shifts fluidly between abstraction, drawing, painting, and print. Inconsistency is not avoided but embraced as a structural principle of the practice.
Teaching and making are not separate activities but part of the same system. Workshop environments mirror the studio: spaces of uncertainty, play, and productive risk. Hierarchies between beginner and advanced practitioner are intentionally flattened in favour of shared inquiry and experimentation.
In this sense, Grose’s practice operates less like a fixed output and more like:
• a laboratory for material investigation
• a conversation in continuous development
• a catalyst for creative confidence and change
