THE SIT DOWN
11: GRACE MCNERNEY
Born in North Yorkshire, she moved to London at 18. Art school (Chelsea College of Art) followed during the pandemic, a moment she describes as lacking in technical grounding but formative in other ways. Working as a studio assistant alongside her studies — including time with Damien Hirst — became an education in itself. Those environments, she notes, offered more in terms of learning how to make and sustain work than formal teaching ever did.
Her paintings begin with found imagery: vinyl sleeves, magazines, recipe books, screenshots — fragments of visual culture that feel both specific and strangely persistent. These references, often dismissed as low-brow or ephemeral, form the basis of compositions that unfold slowly over weeks or months. Built through thin, layered applications of oil, her surfaces remain soft and slightly out of focus, as if recalling something rather than presenting it directly.
At the core of her work is a recurring triad: sex, religion, and death, or as she labels them, all the things you shouldn’t talk about at a dinner party. Raised Catholic, McNerney describes a longstanding discomfort with the way desire is both present and suppressed within religious structures. That tension runs through the work. Glossy sexual imagery sits alongside everyday settings. The result is not quite juxtaposition, but something closer to overlap — a kind of visual schizophrenia, where humour and discomfort exist simultaneously.
Humour plays a crucial role. McNerney is wary of self-seriousness, allowing moments of absurdity to puncture the weight of her subject matter. A painting might begin with a dominant image, something immediately legible, before revealing a second, quieter idea that lingers beneath the surface. It is often this smaller detail that carries the work’s tension.
Stylistically, her approach is shifting. While rooted in photographic source material, she is increasingly drawn towards a looser, more painterly language — looking to artists like Caravaggio not for subject, but for the authority of paint itself. For McNerney, learning to paint is ongoing: knowing when to stop, what to leave unresolved, what to abandon altogether.
Since graduating from Chelsea College of Arts in 2023, she has exhibited across London and beyond, and is preparing for a forthcoming solo presentation with Crème Fraîche. Her work continues to navigate the uneasy space between sincerity and irony — where everything is, as she puts it, up and down… hilarious and terrible at the same time.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
If Caravaggio, Cher Lloyd and Instagram reels had a baby, I’d like to think I would be it, or at least meet it.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I work a lot from photo reference screenshots from old YouTube videos, catalogues of football teams from 80’s north Yorkshire, postcards, model railway leaflets. But really they are secondary to a feeling I’m trying to articulate - using the photos as a sort of visual alphabet. When the right combination of images are collated on a canvas, I know it. Its a feeling and it feels great. Usually for me when I’ve done this successfully the painting feels like its squaring up to me before swiftly telling me its only joking and bringing me in for a hug. Like that friend that’s always joking but also always telling the truth.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
My art is really just how I see the world. It’s how I behave. It’s obnoxious sometimes, it tries very hard to entertain and shed the shame of itself. My paintings are never without a deep underlying existential dread either - I’m never not in the mood for the big questions, annoyingly. Painting is by nature a polite art form. It doesn’t move and doesn’t make any noise, in a lot of ways it is antithetical to who I am but I think that’s where I find the joy. If the job of a painting is to catch the eye, then the genius lies somewhere between not relying on shock value but having the confidence to provoke. I believe it is the painters job to enforce deliberation.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Andy Kauffman