Print Paintings: Urban and Non-Urban Decay
The artist’s gel painting practice operates within a materially driven framework informed by theories of entropy, ruination, and post-anthropocentric materialism. Situated between abstraction and site-responsive observation, the work emerges from sustained engagement with the urban and non-urban environments encountered in places where the artist resides and those accessed through travel. Within these shifting contexts, surfaces function as repositories of temporal, social, and environmental inscription. Layering and mark-making are deployed as iterative, accumulative gestures that parallel processes of accretion, erosion, and stratification, foregrounding time as an active material condition rather than a representational theme.
This conceptual and methodological orientation originates in a formative encounter with urban decay in 1978, when, at the age of seven, the artist observed a billboard subjected to prolonged environmental exposure. The slow degradation of that surface - its peeling layers, faded imagery, and structural fragmentation - functioned as an early experiential model of material transformation beyond the artist’s control. Since then, ruins, the discarded, the weathered, and the aged have operated not as aesthetic motifs but as critical frameworks through which the work interrogates time, authorship, and the limits of intentionality within contemporary art practice.
Sculpture Selected works from 2011-present
The artist’s sculptural practice extends drawing into three-dimensional form, situating sculpture as artefact, ruin, and excavated trace. Informed by the movement of time, archaeology and archival methodologies, the work treats form as evidence of lived experiences, historical realities, and moments that might become forgotten, disregarded, or deliberately obscured. Each sculpture functions as a fragment rather than a complete narrative, inviting readings shaped by speculation.
Material choice and process operate through assembly, erosion, and reconfiguration, exposing the instability of form and vulnerability over time. Some of the works resist permanence, instead aligning with the logic of the ruin: incomplete, contingent, and open to reinterpretation.
Positioned between recovery and decay, the artefact sculptures acknowledge the inevitability of disintegration and historical erasure.
Wire sculpture, 2025.
Wire sculpture, 2025.
Wire sculpture, 2025.
Wire sculpture, 2025.
Wire and plaster 2025
Woodcut, linocut on plaster Fused plaster 2025
Plaster and embedded wire removed 2025
Drypoint etching on plaster 2025
Handmade paper (Shredded documents) Black and white wire, Zinc etching, Red thread 2024
Found object 2023
Found object 2023
Found object 2023
Found object 2023
Trinity Centre, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
Trinity Centre, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
College Green, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
Trafalgar Square, London Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
GWR Parkway, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
GWR Parkway, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
GWR Parkway, Bristol Fibreglass globe sculpture, 2022.
Pewter sculpt, 2019.
Pewter Artefact 2019
Pewter Artefact 2019
Pewter Artefact 2019
Solder, 2019.
Plaster 2019
Pine wood, 2018.
Pine wood, 2018.
Pine wood, 2018.
Pine wood, 2018.
Heart Trail, Taunton, 2021.
Soapstone sculpt and found fossil rock, 2017.
Re-painted found chair, Cyprus, 2013.
Acrylic, MDF, Black Paint, 2012.
Legacies, Lost Generations and The World Reimagined
Lost Generations – Artist Statement
Lost Generations explores the untold stories of individuals long overlooked or erased from historical records. These forgotten figures—working poor, dispossessed, enslaved, and indentured - were integral to the construction of society, yet their contributions have been systematically overshadowed by those in positions of power. The dominant narratives of history have largely celebrated rulers and elites, leaving the vast majority of humanity absent from the collective memory.
Through engagement with hidden and suppressed archives, the works illuminate lives obscured by erasure and historical whitewashing. They investigate the lived experiences of people whose labour, resilience, and suffering underpinned the economic and social structures of their time, including the transatlantic slave trade, which shaped the foundations of modern markets and societies. By foregrounding these narratives, the works challenge conventional history and asserts the significance of the marginalised in shaping history.
The practice functions as an act of remembrance. By excavating obscured histories, the artist seeks to confront the legacies of injustice that continue to reverberate in contemporary post-colonial societies. These sculptures and installations serve as provisional markers of memory, acknowledging absence while resisting the myth of historical completeness. In doing so, Lost Generations questions the authority of dominant narratives, exposes structural inequalities, and invites a more inclusive understanding of the past.
Ultimately, the work compels reflection on the connections between past and present, urging viewers to consider how histories of marginalisation and oppression continue to shape contemporary life. By giving voice to the silenced, Lost Generations foregrounds the collective labour, sacrifice, and endurance that have been foundational to society, fostering a critical engagement with memory, history, and ultimately seeking justice and reparation.
LEGACY
Echoes in the Present
Acrylic Paint on Fibreglass Globe
June 2022
© The World Reimagined & Adam Grose
Public sculpture on permanant display at GWR Parkway Station, Bristol, 2023.
Landscape: Glimpses
Glimpses investigates landscape through the temporal and perceptual experience of movement. The works emerge from journeys - by bicycle, train, or car - where the artist records the shifting landscape through drawing, photography, and video. Rather than capturing a fixed viewpoint, each image responds to fleeting views, fragments, and moments encountered en route, emphasizing duration, transience, and the act of observation itself.
The practice positions the landscape as a layered surface, shaped by time, movement, and perspective. Paintings and works on paper are not literal representations of place, but accumulations of impressions, glimpses, and temporal traces. While the artist occasionally produces paintings of specific views, the majority of the work functions as a responsive meditation on place, assembling experience and observation into a fluid visual record. In this way, Glimpses foregrounds process, perception, and the interplay between movement, memory, and landscape as active agents in the making of the work.
‘I am drawn towards the intricacies of historical narratives and how these intertwine with our contemporary spaces. Exploring past events, traditions, and societal changes, offering an expanded roadmap to further our understanding about the world around us today.’
Transfiguring Landscapes
The artist’s pigment-based work explores the transformation of materials from one state to another. Pigments are collected from sites visited across Somerset, Spain, Cyprus, Mexico, and beyond, encompassing both natural and human-made sources. These materials are suspended in a range of carriers - rainwater, seawater, rock pool water, snow, turpentine, linseed oil, bitumen, and industrialised pigments - allowing each medium to contribute to the alchemy of process and material interaction.
Through this approach, pigments become both record and agent, carrying traces of place, time, and environmental conditions into the work. Natural and industrialised pigments operate as carriers of memory, erosion, and human intervention, emphasizing the continuum between landscape, object, and material. The practice interrogates transformation, accumulation, and decay, positioning the act of handling and mixing pigments as a generative process that foregrounds temporality, contingency, and the layered histories embedded within matter.
Portraiture
Adam Grose’s portrait practice investigates the forms and functions of representation within the historical record of the human species. Through portraiture, he interrogates what it means to be seen, shifting the gaze away from conventional modes of image-making to confront the viewer directly. The works enable the sitter to assert presence and agency, challenging traditional hierarchies of visibility and giving voice to those historically marginalised, obscured, or erased.
These portraits operate as relational and performative sites, enacting and activating the thoughts, memories, and responses of the viewer. Rather than presenting a projected or imagined identity, the works foreground the agency of the sitter, positioning them as co-authors in the act of representation. In this way, the practice emphasizes recognition, accountability, and historical consciousness, seeking to ensure that those who have been ignored or forgotten are acknowledged and remembered within contemporary society.
Print Gallery
Adam Grose’s printmaking practice explores the human condition and landscape through a range of methods and techniques, each chosen to best serve the concept and form of the work. Much of the practice is grounded in the ongoing investigation of Lost Generations, using print as a medium to engage with historical erasure, marginalisation, and social visibility.
Current work focusses on woodcut and relief techniques, drawing on their historical use in pamphlets, newspapers, and printed media to disseminate images of enslaved people, runaways, and those deemed “undesirable.” These early forms of representation often codified the processes of ‘othering’ through crude visual conventions. By revisiting and recontextualizing these methods, the work interrogates both the historical function of print and its capacity to bear witness, giving form and visibility to those silenced by history.
The practice positions printmaking as a critical, material archive, foregrounding the interplay between image, memory, and social power.
Drawings Selected works from 2013-present
The Soundscape Albums
Adam Grose’s soundscape practice investigates the improvised and evolving nature of musical composition, emphasizing process, temporality, and emergent form. Each work begins with an initial concept—often genre-based, mood-driven, or exploratory—and unfolds through extended periods of engagement, allowing sonic elements to arrive, recede, and reconfigure over months or years. The compositions develop organically, privileging the inherent character of sound and the interplay between chance, repetition, and structural evolution.
Rooted in decades of musical practice, including DJ performance (1987–2007) and piano training from 1982, the work reflects both formal musical understanding and an experimental ethos. Albums such as Between Heaven and Earth (2003) and the forthcoming Entropicism (2024) trace a continuum of sonic inquiry, exploring texture, rhythm, and temporal layering as material in their own right. These soundscapes resist conventional narrative or expectation, creating immersive, contingent experiences that unfold in time, foregrounding process, transformation, and the unpredictability of perception.
Between Heaven and Earth (2003)
Cosmogenesis (Graphic Novel OST, 2007)
Mandala (2010)
Phantasmagorical (2020)
We Dance to the Break of Dawn (2025)
Osiris Returns (2027)
Stars (2005)
Sol (2008)
Concrescence (2017)
Entropicism (2024)
Compositions (2025)
FIRSTS : 23 (2026)
An album bringing together the first song from each album produced over the last 23 years. 11 soundscapes from 11 albums of tunage. A kind of 'best of compilation'.
All soundscape albums are composed, constructed and edited by Adam R. Grose using a variety of instruments and devices between 2003 to 2026 (except where another has been credited). All Rights Reserved. No part of these soundscapes, albums and individual tracks may be used in any other way without the express permission of Adam R. Grose and his estate. You can freely listen to each album and share with others. Thank you for listening.
