Molly Grad is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, working across the mediums of drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and textiles. Grad is investigating personal, ancestral, and collective trauma, through enacting radical empathy towards its least visible – inanimate objects or live occupants alike. Utilising multiple platforms, she performs an excavation process into urban cities’ industrial pasts, thus interfering with the vertical axis and inverting social orders as a solution to our current state. Grad started performing “Fleeting Street sculpture” 3 years ago, in which she explores the potential of every day urban landscapes to create site-specific, short-lived experiences utilising existing materials/structures narrated to create an emergence - a radical change actant.

Manholes are constantly edited out of our vision, just like the fluorescent clad men that go into them. Subconsciously, these are the places and the people, that are invisible to us, as a society. Grad sees manholes as a portal of transformation and occurrence. They are the gates, separating up and down, good and bad, female and male. To her, manholes are the canvas for the imaginary, entrance to a utopian world free of binaries. They are a path to radical empathy. The shoes she paints on them are cobbled from different power tools, devoid of body.
How does one feel wearing these contraptions?

BIO

A past alumna of Central Saint Martins, London, for both her MA and BA degrees, Grad then went on to work for luxury fashion houses in the capacity of Design Director. Her design training brought her love of the human body to the surface, along with questioning society’s positioning of class and sexuality as politically appropriated commodities. Her past in the luxury fashion industry is present as a silent witness/performer in her recent artworks, as she weaves in and out of issues exploring systemic abuse, the quest for equality and power symbols within contemporary consumer culture.