Project Room: Soft Voices: Grace Tobin

In this series, we see Tobin develop her instantly recognisable monochromatic style in an exploration of collected memories and emotional touchstones. Tobin brings us on a journey across a series of imagined domestic settings, offering us an insight into the small intimate moments that build a memory of a person or place.

There is a quietness to Tobin’s works. They are not melodramatic, but rather moments of tranquillity and calm. A curtain in the breeze, or a pot of steaming tea. We all know these moments, these smells, and textures, but by taking them out of context, Tobin elevates them. She offers the viewer an alternative, it is not life’s great moments that build our memories, but rather the everyday.

The monochromatic yellow colour pallet leans further into the dream-like quality of the works, as if offering the viewer, a glimpse at a moment in time through ‘rose tinted glasses’, a hazy and romanticised view of everyday reality. Tobin asks us to explore the notion of memory itself. Memory is not factual, it can be altered and changed based on our own narratives and influences. We must ask ourselves would another see these intimate portraits of domesticity with such tenderness and emotion as Tobin portrays them, or would it simply be another day, another breakfast, another armchair.

In exploring our relationship to the environment and the spaces that we inhabit and call home, Tobin considers how we personalise space in alignment with ideas of our own identity. Space holds aspects of self as we infuse it with our own narratives, making environments of our own and extending ourselves into our surroundings. Tobin’s experience as British growing up between New York City and London impacted her ideas of community and connection between our surroundings and the disposition of our character. How do our homes reflect our greater environments, and which elements of those environments do we choose to present in our most personal spaces?

Tobin completed a BA (Hons) in Visual Arts at Oberlin College in 2016 and a MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, completed in June 2022. Her works have been exhibited around the world, including Taipei, New York, Shanghai, and Brussels. She also took part in a residency at Soho Review in 2023.

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