S.L. Grice
acrylic on canvas

Simultaneously searching for a taste of innocence and an epiphany of existence, my work meanders between the sweet and the grotesque. Something seems out of balance in the world, as if the very fabric of the mundane and comfortable lives we've constructed will quake and break apart around our heels. Good! It strikes as a disaster and opens an opportunity to attain our greatest innermost qualities; the people we have so longed to become. Many of my characters seem lost or clueless to their path. Many of us know this feeling at one time or another. My art hints at the freakish things at the fringes of our world, the outcasts that repel us at first sight, but turn out to be our guides, our mentors, the champions of our hearts and the challengers of our belief systems that no longer serve our paths. They are the ones who have not forgotten what we have forgotten. They are there to remind us and cause us to challenge ourselves so that we find our purpose buried within.

Growing up in cookie cutter, consumer culture suburbia I developed a taste for the weird and that's all the drive was for a time, something odd or out of the ordinary. Weird comes from the Anglo Saxon "wyrd" which was defined as fate or personal destiny. Destiny here is not to mean set in stone or unavoidable, but rather the nuturing of one's own innate abilities and their manifestation into reality. In Norse cosmology wyrd is akin to the great mystery of the First Peoples of North America, the weaving and manifesting of realities both personal and universal. My work demonstrates the longing and need for mystery and challenging the idea that we have to have everything figured out and under control.