{"id":437963,"date":"2026-05-12T14:01:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/437963\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T14:01:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:01:09","slug":"harry-grundys-new-works-on-sandpaper-are-drawn-at-3000rpm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/437963\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Grundy\u2019s new works on sandpaper are drawn at 3,000RPM"},"content":{"rendered":"

Struck by the sheer variety of the stuff \u2013 all the diverse and unusual forms one the humble tool could take, from \u201csoft blue Japanese sheets made with ceramic particles, Spanish orange paper with lovely lettering that peeks through the translucent grit and small belts for the machine that curled up like animals\u201d, he came away a big bag of unusual offcuts, and an idea. The artist wanted to create drawings on sandpaper, so he took his supplies to an artist residency in New Hampshire<\/a>, run by Bianca Roden, to spend the next two weeks \u201cscratching away and finding a style that suited the specific material,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

After a few fun discoveries and experiments, unveiling gloriously earthy palettes from rosewood, maple and olive wood on all kinds of grits, Harry began to explore drawing with larger machines last year. Treating belt sanders as his rotating canvases, the artist has created a range of drawings at 3,000rpm that look like sunsets, with soft gradients of colour that seep into one another. Other pieces have been made at a slower speed, over the course of a day and by hand in Harry\u2019s studio, many of which have taken on the appearance of textiles or sewing patterns. This loom-like motion drawing motion of pulling the wood back and forth across the paper to mark strong lines, \u201cborrows something from the textile mills in West Yorkshire, near to where I sourced some of the additional wood\u201d, the artist says.<\/p>\n

The near two year long project has given Harry the joy of \u201ccreating something sensitive and slow from something biting and fast\u201d, he says. \u201cThey say that some of the safest jobs in a post-AI world are the \u2018skilled trades\u2019 although I don\u2019t think this is exactly what they meant,\u201d he adds. This slow, manual making has had \u201ca kind of liberating irrelevance\u201d to it all, he says. A bit of a refuge from the world, the artist\u2018s studio has become \u2013 \u201ca place where making a drawing with sandpaper is the most important thing\u201d, and in the process of bringing together the series, secluded him entirely from digital noise. \u201cThat feels very healthy to me, because it\u2019s slightly absurd and entirely mine,\u201d he ends. \u201cI love that it has taken nearly two years to scratch wood into sandpaper, I\u2019m proud of this strange use of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sandpaper series has since been on display at The Incubator Gallery in London in the artist\u2019s solo show Full Pelt<\/a>, curated by Angelica Jopling. Now in the run up to his next show Harry is set to put a selection of the works up on show in an exhibition with Rachel Mortlock at New Art Projects in Islington<\/a>, opening on the 23 April 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Struck by the sheer variety of the stuff \u2013 all the diverse and unusual forms one the humble…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-437963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}