Q&A: Garth Gratrix, New Contemporaries Collaborative PhD participant

We’re pleased to announce our new PhD candidate, artist Garth Gratrix. Garth will work 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. We’re placing artists at the centre of everything we do, while exploring new directions for practice and development.

WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT EXPERIENCE DO YOU BRING?

I come to this primarily as an artist. That’s the centre of it—even if, over time, my practice has expanded into curating, organising and building structures around other artists.

For the past decade, I’ve been working in and alongside artist-led ecologies—most significantly through Abingdon Studios in Blackpool—trying to hold space for artists to develop in ways that feel possible, especially in places where support is inconsistent or fragile.

That work has involved raising funds, building programmes, curating exhibitions, mentoring, forming partnerships and cultural strategy consortiums, and often just being present. But underneath all of that is the same question I carry as an artist myself: how do we sustain a life in practice without being pulled away from it?

I don’t come to this from a position of having “figured it out.” If anything, I come quite tired—still precarious, still not sustained by my practice alone, still trying to make the conditions that might allow that to happen.

So the experience I bring is lived, ongoing and unresolved. It’s not expertise at a distance—it’s being inside the same tensions I’m now trying to research.

DURING THE PDH WHAT WILL YOU RESEARCH AND WHY?

I’m researching early-career artist development—but really I’m trying to understand what it means to remain an artist within and without the systems that are supposed to support you.

There’s an irony in that. The more time I’ve spent building opportunities, advocating, organising—doing the work around art—the more I’ve felt the risk of moving further away from the practice itself. That slippage feels important.

So this research is, in part, a way of staying close to that question: how do artists remain artists? And what kinds of systems are required to genuinely support that, rather than quietly redirecting it into administration, production, or survival?

I’m particularly interested in non-linear and queer ways of understanding development—ways that allow for slowness, failure, pauses, sideways movement. Because that’s what it actually looks like, even if the structures around us often don’t recognise it.

This feels urgent because so many artists are navigating precarity, multiple roles, and unstable conditions, while still being expected to produce, perform and progress. I want to explore how we might build systems that don’t extract from artists, but actually sustain them and consider them within cultural leadership and infrastructure.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE WILL BE ACHIEVED?

I don’t think this research will “solve” anything, and I’m cautious of that kind of language. But I hope it can create space to rethink some of the assumptions we hold about artists and their development.

I want to question the idea that artists need to constantly move forward, produce more, become more visible. And instead ask what it might look like to support artists to simply continue—to stay with a practice over time, even when it’s quiet, slow or uncertain.

I’m interested in systems that allow artists to remain artists, rather than becoming administrators of their own survival. That might mean slower forms of support, more relational approaches, or ways of valuing things that aren’t easily measurable.

At the same time, I’m aware that stepping into research—and into leadership spaces—comes with its own risks. There’s always the possibility of moving further from practice. So part of what I hope to hold onto is that tension, rather than resolve it.

If anything, I hope the research stays accountable to artists’ lived realities, including my own. Periods of defining and undefining seem pertinent.

WHAT ARE YOUR TOP THREE RECENT EXHIBITIONS?

I tend to think about this less in terms of fixed favourites and more in terms of practices that I return to—especially those that hold complexity without trying to resolve it.

1. With that in mind I feel my recent curatorial project WINK WINK encapsulates a number of artists I feel are important and significant today and within contemporary art history. Artists included Helen Cammock, Rene Matic, Jonathan Baldock, Rafal Zajko, Sunil Gupta, Will Hughes, Stuart Semple, Trackie McCleod, Harold Offeh, Ro Robertson, SHARP, Ally Rosenberg, Lothar Goetz, Jacob Talkowski, Sarah Joy Ford, Jez Dolan, Chester Tenneson, Topher Campbell and Jenkins Van Zyl.
   
   
2. Additional nods are a solo show by Will Hughes at MIMA, Middlesbrough. Which is a wonderfully confident understanding of queerness, materiality, glamour and sensuality.
   
   
3. As well as recent Royal Academy exhibitions by Alex Margo Arden and Gusty Ferro, again further showcasing the nuanced and non-binary ways queer artists are making work today.
   
   
4. Sod it—I’ll add a fourth: my solo exhibition Flamboyant Flamingos, featuring Derek Jarman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. It marked a profound shift for me, both personally and professionally, emerging at a time shaped by grief and loss. The exhibition became a turning point—moving my practice from an emergent position into something more complex, uncertain, and reflective of a mid-career moment.
   

WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT WORKING WITH NEW CONTEMPORARIES?

New Contemporaries sits at a really particular moment in an artist’s life—just at the point of emergence, where things are still open, fragile and full of possibility.

What excites me is the chance to spend time within that space—not just observing it, but being part of a conversation about what it means to support artists at that stage now.

I’m interested in how an organisation with that history can continue to evolve, especially in response to the realities artists are facing today. And how it might hold space for different kinds of trajectories—not just the visible or successful ones, but the quieter, slower and less certain paths too.

On a personal level, it feels important to stay connected to artists at that point. It keeps things honest. It reminds me why any of this matters.

I’m excited, but also aware of the responsibility—and of my own position within it. I don’t want to move away from being an artist. If anything, I want this experience to bring me closer to that, even as it complicates it.

This collaborative PhD is funded by Northern Bridge Consortium.