Harry Grundy’s solo exhibition Laughing at the Machine, draws on moments of industrial tension. Quite literally. Sandpaper becomes a surface for marks made with a variety of hardwoods from around the world, studio drawers host frenetic abstractions made by chance and the innocuous office tape dispenser appears to swell into something obnoxious. This body of work examines how we work and how that work can be disrupted in an act of quiet resistance.

Grundy’s sandpaper drawings take on a sartorial aesthetic with plaids, pinstripes and tartans emerging from the grit. The act of dragging wood back and forth on the surface mimics that of a Victorian loom. The type of machine used in the textile factories in nearby Matlock and further down the River Derwent. At one time the Luddites (those textile workers who organised against their replacement in factories by machines) were threatened with the death penalty should they

destroy the new technology. Grundy takes care to sew the automated and handcrafted together. Some of the works are made by using the sandpaper belts to sharpen the wood, before new forms are added through drawing with it. Here the artist laughs at the machine rather than destroying it all together. Much of the hardwood and some of the machinery used to create this series was inherited from Grundy’s family friend Steve Wing, who created fine furniture and toys

for his family in his Didsbury shed for over 50 years.

Across from the gallery in Age Uk on Market Place a single sandpaper drawing, Sweater (320 Grit) has been donated as if it were any other second hand item. The drawing has been priced by the charity shop and is on view for the duration of the show and is available for sale. All proceeds are kept by Age Uk.

Elsewhere, hand-carved sea chalk dice have been rolled until a six appears in the drawers of Grundy’s studio. The material is sourced from the white cliffs near the artist’s studio in Margate and appears in an ongoing project called ‘The Moon’s Doing’. Once the dice are carved they are thrown into the North Sea, close to where their material was foraged to be rolled by the tide. The dice emerge at low tide with their fated numbers facing the moon that moved them. ‘Employee of the Month (September)’ plays with modern notions of work culture. Choosing to hero the most forgettable of office detritus, the tape dispenser. The sculpture is part of a series that canonises the object - championing the banal - much like the metrics used to value a typical employee in the throes of late stage capitalism.

Working in the natural world in a deeply unnatural time. Grundy is interested in how the green touches the grey and how human behaviour stirs the two together. With a background in design, ideas are treated with a rigorous honesty and crafted with a graphic eye. Centring his practice around rural and coastal British ecologies, Harry asks the viewer to look closely and critically at our relationship with this phenomenal world.

Harry Grundy (b.1993) is a Margate, UK based artist who has recently exhibited with Alice Amati, Slugtown and Unit 1 Gallery and had a solo show at The Whitaker Museum in 2022. In September 2023 he presented his first public commissions for the Chester Contemporary in the UK. He completed residencies in Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy in July 2023 and took part in a group show there a few months later. Grundy has created sculptural editions for Hi Noon Editions and Object Multiple and a book of poems with Saltstung Press. He has guest tutored at Kingston University and London College of Communication. Grundy has written for Elephant Magazine, AIGA, and Creative Lives in Progress. He graduated from Kingston School of Art in 2016 with first class honours in graphic design and trained as a clown at Albert and Friends Circus School in 2007.