Adam Grose is a Somerset-based contemporary artist, educator, and facilitator, known particularly around Taunton for his work in painting, drawing, and process-led creative practice. A practising visual artist whose work focuses on mark-making, abstraction, and experimentation. Strongly associated with @ciccictaunton, @gocreatetaunton, @artshubgallery, and the @orchardgallerytaunton, where he has led influential Creative Methodologies and Printmaking courses and workshops.
Recognised locally as an artist-teacher who helps people develop confidence, process, and personal visual language rather than fixed styles, his reputation is built less on commercial galleries and more on impact and influence within the local art community. He plays a key role in supporting emerging and returning artists in Somerset, Devon, and Dorset.
Media: painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media with an emphasis on intuition and experimentation, breaking creative blocks, and process over product. His workshops often attract artists already practising who want to push their work forward.
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Work is process-led: experimentation, repetition, erasure, risk
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Paintings and drawings often feel open-ended, exploratory, sometimes unresolved
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The artwork is evidence of thinking in action
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Does not lock into a single style or motif
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Shifts between abstraction, drawing, painting, and mixed media
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Allows inconsistency as part of the practice
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Teaching is not separate from making — it’s part of the artwork’s ecology
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Workshops mirror his studio methods: uncertainty, play, risk
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Actively flattens hierarchies between beginner and professional
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Emphasises shared inquiry rather than authority
Adam Grose’s practice is closer to:
• a laboratory than a showroom
• a conversation rather than a statement
• a catalyst rather than a monument
My Artist and Teaching Philosophy
My Teaching Philosophy: Empowering Access to Arts and Creativity
My teaching philosophy is all about giving everyone the chance to engage with the arts and explore their creativity. Through over 30 years of artistic and teaching experience, I have developed a passion for sharing my knowledge and skills with others, helping them unleash their creative potential.
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Creating Art Through Exploration and Investigation
One of the key aspects of my teaching philosophy is encouraging students to explore different methods and techniques when creating art. By allowing them to experiment and investigate various approaches, individuals can discover new ways of expressing themselves through artwork.
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Sharing Knowledge and Skills
I believe in imparting the knowledge and skills I have gained over decades of experience to my students. Through workshops and classes, I strive to empower others to develop their artistic abilities and grow as creators. By sharing what I have learned, I hope to inspire and motivate others on their creative journey.
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Art as a Transformer of Ideas
Art has the power to transform ideas into tangible creations, and I aim to help my students harness this transformative potential. By guiding individuals in turning their concepts into artwork, I enable them to communicate their thoughts and emotions visually. Through this process, students can deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them.
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Expanding Creative Arts in Taunton
Through my involvement in various organisations and events in Taunton, I have contributed to the expansion of the creative arts scene in the county town. By collaborating with CICCIC, GoCreate CIC, Taunton Flower Show, BTC, TYCA, State of Trust and this September 2025, World Art Games (WAG), we have helped bring art workshops and activities to a wide range of audiences. These initiatives have provided children and adults alike, the opportunity to engage with the arts and explore their creativity in a supportive and caring environment.
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Highlighting Important Issues Through Art
In addition to fostering creativity, I have used art as a platform to address important issues such as climate change, health and wellbeing, and youth arts. Through commissions and projects, I have explored themes that resonate with current societal challenges, sparking conversations and raising awareness through artistic expression.
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Bringing History to Life Through Art
One of my recent commissions, "The World Reimagined," sought to bring elements of history to a broader audience through the arts. By highlighting significant historical events and narratives concerning the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, I aimed to engage viewers in a dialogue about the past and its impact on the present. Through this project, I demonstrated how art can serve as a powerful tool for storytelling and connecting with our shared heritage, through 'Echoes in the Present'. My globe is a permanent sculpture situated at GWR Parkway station in Bradley Stoke, Bristol.
In conclusion, my teaching philosophy revolves around enabling access to the arts and creativity for all, regardless. By providing opportunities for exploration, sharing knowledge and skills, and using art as a transformer of ideas, I strive to empower individuals the ability to express themselves through creativity, build confidence and increase self-esteem. Through my work in Taunton and beyond, I have witnessed the transformative power of art in bringing people together, sparking conversations, and inspiring positive change in the world, individually and as a community.
Remember, art is not just about creating something beautiful; it's about connecting with others, expressing yourself, and making a difference in the world through creativity. So, whether you're a seasoned artist or a complete beginner, don't be afraid to pick up a paintbrush, grab a pencil, or mould some clay—because art truly has the power to change lives and bring communities together.
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Adam Grose’s practice investigates materiality, temporality, and historical presence across multiple media, from painting and sculpture to print, sound, and performance. Central to his work is an engagement with process, transformation, and the traces of human and environmental histories, exploring how matter, perception, and memory converge to shape experience. Across his practice, Grose interrogates absence, erasure, and visibility, creating works that respond to the world as both archive and site of active, emergent potential.
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Gel Paintings (Click left menu to access images)
The gel paintings emerge from landscapes encountered in places where the artist resides and travels, translating surfaces shaped by time, exposure, and human intervention into accumulative layers of mark-making. Acts of abrasion, removal, and destabilisation introduce chance and material resistance as co-agential forces, foregrounding process over resolution. The works resist notions of completion, existing as provisional states that register temporality, impermanence, and the aesthetic potential of decay.
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Sculpture (Click left menu to access images)
Sculpture extends the act of drawing into three-dimensional form, situating each work as artefact, ruin, and excavated trace. Engaging with archival and materialist theories, the sculptures reveal histories and lives marginalised or erased, emphasising absence, fragmentation, and temporal layering. Through processes of assembly, erosion, and reconfiguration, the works resist permanence, foregrounding matter as an agent and positioning the sculptures as provisional markers between recovery and loss.
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Lost Generations (Click left menu to access images)
Lost Generations interrogates historical erasure and the systemic invisibility of enslaved, dispossessed, and marginalised peoples. Througoh exploring historical archives, the works explore forgotten individuals as active agents who shaped society. Using sculpture, installation, and mark-making, the series foregrounds labour, resilience, and endurance while challenging dominant narratives, exposing structural inequalities, and reflecting on the ongoing legacies of injustice in contemporary society.
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Glimpses (Click left menu to access images)
Glimpses explores landscape through movement and temporality, capturing fleeting views and fragments encountered during journeys by bicycle, train, or car. Drawings, photography, video, and paintings respond to these transient experiences, emphasising perception, duration, and relational engagement with place. The works foreground the interplay between memory, observation, and landscape as active agents, registering the ephemeral and contingent nature of experience.
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Pigment Practice (Click left menu to access images)
In his pigment-based work, Grose transforms landscape and material through the collection and manipulation of pigments from sites across Somerset, Spain, Cyprus, Mexico, and beyond. Pigments - both natural and industrial - are suspended in carriers such as rainwater, seawater, snow, linseed, and bitumen, allowing environmental and historical traces to inform the work. The practice emphasises transformation, accumulation, and decay, creating material records that carry the histories and memory embedded in place.
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Portraiture (Click left menu to access images)
Portraits examine what it means to be seen, shifting the gaze from conventional representation to confront the viewer while foregrounding the agency of the sitter. These works activate memory and reflection in the viewer, giving voice to those historically marginalised, obscured, or silenced. The practice positions portraiture as relational and performative, emphasising recognition, accountability, and the critical negotiation of historical visibility.
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Printmaking (Click left menu to access images)
Grose’s printmaking investigates the human condition and landscape through methods selected to serve concept and form. Grounded in the themes of Lost Generations, his work revisits historical print techniques, particularly woodcut and relief, to interrogate the dissemination of images that once codified social hierarchies, slavery, and ‘othering.’ Printmaking becomes both archive and critique, giving form and visibility to histories long suppressed while exploring the interplay of image, memory, and power.
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Soundscapes (Click left menu to access images)
Soundscape albums explore process, improvisation, and temporal emergence. Beginning with mood, genre, or conceptual prompts, each composition evolves organically over months or years, allowing sonic elements to arrive, recede, and reconfigure. Rooted in decades of musical practice, from piano training to DJ performance, the works foreground texture, rhythm, and temporal layering, creating immersive, contingent experiences that emphasise transformation, unpredictability, and the agency of sound itself.
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Through these diverse strands, Grose’s practice consistently foregrounds the interplay between material, memory, and historical presence. Across media, his work interrogates absence, visibility, and temporality, positioning both human and material agency as central to understanding the traces that shape contemporary perception, culture, and society.
Articles & Interviews
Kubla Khan
Adam Grose
If you had peeked through the doors of Taunton’s Creative Innovation Centre on the 21st October last year you would have witnessed a very unusual birthday party and overheard the guests singing happy birthday to a certain ‘Ess-Tee-See.’ The guest of honour was not present, nor could he have been, as the S.T.C in question was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Self Publisher Magazine
Adam Grose
Contact
Adam is always looking for new and exciting opportunities concerning workshops, exhibitions, teaching, commissions, murals & residencies. Please contact via the links on the right.
07747 846790
