Artwork

Gracie Beck Schylling is an emerging multi-media artist working across painting, sculpture, animation, poetry and collage. Her practice is rooted in ideas related to spiritualism, transcendence and the unconscious. Combining diverse media, she explores these themes through the lens of synaesthesia – the experience when one sensory perception evokes another – to translate her personal impressions into immersive visual compositions. “I’m fascinated by associations we all hold inherently – how colours can conjure up specific imagery, how music and sound can trigger a memory, or how a particular light can evoke a sense of place and time. I think of my practice as a mechanism through which I can examine and replicate this feeling, channeling all my sensory experiences into what I create,” she says.

Gracie, originally from Massachusetts, USA, completed her BA in Emergent Digital Practices, Studio Art and Film Studies at the University of Denver, in Colorado. Transitioning from digital media to painting, she went on to pursue a Graduate Diploma and an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in London, where she is currently based. Employing analogue shape-making techniques such as paper cut-outs and collage to create stop motion animations, Gracie’s work is often accompanied by live projections and atmospheric soundscapes that enhance its meditative quality.

Inspired by modernist colour field paintings, landscape art, and the abstraction of Kandinsky, in her work Gracie explores the emotional, mythic and spiritual depths contained within a single colour or form. “The art that speaks to me most uses an ambiguous language that touches you without knowing why, like when a colour combination resonates with your soul for no particular reason. Agnes Martin said, ‘from music, people accept pure emotion, but from art they demand explanation’, which really resonates with me. I’m drawn to art that doesn't need to be explained or defined yet still stirs something deeply emotional in me, much like music does.” Her paper cut-out animations, including Interplay and Yellow Mania, reflect on and celebrate this transportative power evoked by the overlap of different sensory stimuli. Central to both Gracie’s process and work is the state of flow—the sublime experience of being fully immersed in the present moment. “When you are in the studio and ‘in the flow’, it feels as if you’d be plugged into some greater force. Creating in any medium is a form of spirituality, a way of reconnecting with the present, and with the universal oneness”. Her audiovisual installations including Light Show and Portal, featuring multicoloured cellophane cut-outs animated in real time under a vintage overhead projector, have similarly transfixing and hypnotic effects that draw the viewer into a sense of losing oneself in the acts of making, looking or play.

Informed by her childhood memories, nature, specifically the way it is experienced, is another key reference point for Gracie. “I’m constantly thinking about the place where I grew up: the light, the ocean and the forest, as well as that crazy charged feeling you have as a child, because everything is new. When I create, I am trying to tap into that sensation over and over again.” Ultimately, by turning her attention inward, Gracie’s practice is centred on capturing the tranquil emotional and spiritual state that emerges from the simple act of observing, and being present to the world around us. “For me, art is a relic of the process of attuning to life—being in harmony with the forces of existence and becoming a channel through which this energy flows.”

Currently, Gracie is working on a new series of large scale paintings of a meditative nature as well as continuing to work with soundscape and animation. She is also preparing for her forthcoming London exhibition at her studio at Koppel Heights- with open studios of the site taking place between 11 and 12 April 2025.