Garth Gratrix / Dip in the Pool

An Opening Reception will take place on Saturday 8 August from 2-4pm.

Dip in the Pool is Garth Gratrix's first major Irish solo exhibition. A sun-lounger of a show that looks, from a distance, like a holiday. Get closer, and it's something else entirely: spinning plates, custom beach towels, suspended colour, cruising-app intimacy, grief, inheritance, fridge magnets and a very particular colour palette, all arranged according to rules that never quite resolve.

Gratrix (b.1984, lives and works in Blackpool) treats the gallery as a kind of free cruising ground and a space to rest, reinvent and reconsider. Blackpool and Bray are both Victorian promenade towns, built on the push and pull between visitor economies and the people who actually live there, between rest and reinvigoration. That tension runs through everything on show, alongside a playful but pointed critique of how slow institutions can be on access, intersectionality, and paying artists fairly.

At the centre of the exhibition sits its title work: Dip in the Pool, powder coated steel plinths evoking a lagoon or pool lane — minimal, expansive, faintly absurd. Positioned at either end are two fibreglass chaise sculptures — the show's tantric-love-seat-inspired forms, recut according to Gratrix's own nine-inch rule and titled Innocent Peach/Fresh Squeezed and Gobstopper/Comfy Jeans, fabricated at Blackpool Illuminations. Designed originally for optimum pleasure, they've been altered into something closer to a place for temporary bodily rest, or experimentation, or a laugh.

An insertion act within the centrepiece comes in the form of Flamboyant Flamingos (2024) bronze-cast spinning plates on 81-inch steel poles, cast from plates once used by the artist's father performing as Rainbow the Clown in the 1990s and 2000s. The work speaks to absurd inheritance, precarious balance, livelihoods.

Shy Girl… (2020–present) places a pair of custom beach towels throughout the space; strewn, folded, placed, resting. Offering the potential of an ever-changing sculptural work that shifts with every installation. A related archive film, Shy Girl… (Just Browsing), catches Gratrix at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, refusing to leave as the rest of the show is dismantled around him and staying with his towels a little longer than invited, queering the gallery's own choreography of deinstallation.

Voiles (2024) offers a pause: a collection of suspended colour voiles forming a transitional field of allure and colour-field pleasure, walked through rather than looked at from a distance. Inspired by transitional spaces and thresholds, they become metaphors of queer lived experience and are tethered to the artist's other work back in Blackpool, a flamingo-pink neon acquired by the V&A and Contemporary Art Society, in perpetuity above the entrance to Grundy Art Gallery, with the coded message "Mummy’s Boy" in Morse.

On the walls, two series of nine-inch pearlescent aluminium prints work as colour-field compositions, gradients partially veiling the images beneath. Meat and Greet (2023) repeats an image of the artist's body traced back to an early photograph shared on Grindr, disguised across nine panels in shifting hues. Its 2026 companion, Lady Gratrix, uses the same palette to depict Lady, the cat Gratrix took in after his mother's passing in 2024, edging closer across the nine frames as she notices she's being watched. The nine colours running through both are Wink Wink, Cheeky Felicia, No Boundaries, Freshly Washed, Fresh Squeezed, Kindness of Strangers, Snake Charmer, Innocent Peach, Lone Splendour, and double as a quiet index of the artist's own exhibition history.


A screening room presents REST
(2024), a nine-screen, nine-minute film made with artist Nicola Dale at Grundy Art Gallery. A document of the two artists paying one another to take a day off. Rest, performed, displayed, and economically negotiated.

Threaded across the walls is Kindness of Strangers (2016–present), a decade of fridge magnets gifted or collected since the artist admitted, publicly, that he couldn't afford a holiday of his own ("good job I live in a holiday resort"). Installed across a grid of nine-inch steel squares, they form a playful, dispersed archive of place, identity, kinship and care.

Dip in the Pool doesn't ask visitors to resolve any of this before they walk in. It asks them to notice the gaps between things. How close is close, how far is away, what happens on repeat; and to wonder how often exactly this kind of measure gets quietly applied to their own rest, their own bodies, their own lives, without anyone ever writing the rules down.

All of it — plates, plinth, towels, voiles, prints, magnets, film — is arranged according to a rule that never fully settles: nine inches apart, together, away, repeat. Part measurement, part innuendo, part choreography, it decides how close two works are allowed to get, when they touch, when they hold their distance, and when the whole pattern starts again — a rhythm drawn from Gratrix's own interest in abstracting and queering lived experience, so that we might expose ourselves to broader ideas and agilities in how we look, think, cruise materials and cruise space.

In October, that question traverses outside the gallery and back again. Irish dancer and choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir joins Gratrix for a live collaboration beginning on Bray beachfront and travelling inward to Mermaid Arts Centre. Ó Conchúir works from and with the body directly; Gratrix works with what the body leaves behind. Remnants, traces, abstractions. Between the beach and the gallery, over the exhibition's final weeks, the two practices meet somewhere in the middle. A newfound place where the moving body and the traces it leaves and the visitors' reading of that journey come together, for a moment.

Come for the flamingos. Stay for the questions that balance underneath them.

Garth Gratrix (b.1984, lives and works in Blackpool, UK) makes sculpture, photography and installation drawn from the material culture of British and Irish seaside leisure — spinning plates, custom towels, suspended colour, fridge magnets, painted plinths — to explore queerness, inheritance, rest and the politics of taking up space. His work has been acquired by UK institutional collections including the V&A, Contemporary Art Society, Grundy Art Gallery, and Peter Scott Gallery.

Recent exhibitions include Queer Painting, Amici, Hastings (2026); Just Browsing, The Bluecoat, Liverpool (2026); Flamboyant Flamingos, feat. Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Derek Jarman, Grundy Art Gallery (2024); WINK WINK, Whitworth Art Gallery (2023); and Cheeky Felicia, Scarborough Museums (2023). He has exhibited alongside artists including Lubaina Himid, Helen Cammock, Rene Matić, Jonathan Baldock, Rafal Zajko, Sunil Gupta, Harold Offeh, Ro Robertson, Ally Rosenberg, Mark Titchner, Sadie Lee, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, and Fiona Banner.

Gratrix founded Abingdon Studios, Blackpool, and Lancashire's coastline's first contemporary art studio and project space provision. He became a Clore Leadership Fellow in 2023, and has undertaken residencies at Hospitalfield (Scotland), Porthmeor Studios (St Ives), and apexart (New York).

They are currently a PhD candidate working with New Contemporaries and the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Teesside University on a new research strand for the organisation, designed to strengthen how we support early career artists.

Image Credit: Garth Gratrix, Flamboyant Flamingos, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, UK (2024). Photo credit: Benjamin Nuttall