We recently connected with Nathan Grimes and have shared our conversation below.

Nathan, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I consider myself a creative risk taker. In most other aspects of my life, I am risk avoidant. My childhood was chaotic and dangerous at times. As a kid, I lacked the power to positively change my home environment. Things happened to me, and I felt acted upon like a passive object with little agency. I often made myself small, quiet, and compliant. Taking risks could’ve compromised this survival strategy. As an adult navigating reality, I still grapple with this deep-rooted shrinking way of being. However, throughout my life, my creativity has known few bounds.

This unboundedness in my early imagination now influences an unboundedness in my adult artistic practice. My conceptual interests and material experiments expand beyond disciplinary distinction. I’ve become a kitchen sink kind of artist with everything intermingling. The risk and challenge of this is learning how to curate what comes back out of the kitchen sink. Trial and error play an important part as I explore the possibilities. Public exhibition of what comes from my kitchen sink raises the stakes even higher. My work tends to be very personal and diaristic. It also takes up a lot of physical space. Both the emotional candidness and object presence exist in opposition to my old “shrinking” survival strategy. While I’m in no real physical danger apart from bumping my head as I install the work, sharing my story certainly feels risky.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Born in the Great Smokey Mountains and raised in the swamps of the Florida panhandle, I am an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Holly Springs, North Carolina. My creative practice explores visual art, poetry, music, engineering, and stuff from the dumpster. As a collector, converter, composer, and conductor, I am concerned with interrelating fragments of various kinds. To this conceptual end, no medium, object, or idea is off limits. I have exhibited both nationally and internationally. I received my BFA in Studio Art / Painting from the Florida State University, and an MFA in Studio Art / Painting from the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign.

Over the past five years, my visual work has shifted from formal non-representational abstraction toward an expanded kind of abstracted figurative painting. At the same time, my narrative songwriting, sound experiments, and found object collections have erupted into the realm of visual art. Desiring to contextualize these different bodies of work, I have focused them through the lens of my lived experience. The resulting objects present obsessively worked surfaces, unusual structures, and curious sounds that entreat the viewer to pay closer attention.

I primarily make work for the purposes of continued creative growth and professional development as a career-minded artist. That is, I’m focused more on concept and process than commercial product. I occasionally sell work and hope to continue, but that is secondary to artmaking and exhibiting for the time being. I also produce work on commission in a variety of subjects and media depending on the client’s needs. To financially support myself and my art practice I am employed as a contract museum preparator and freelance art installer. Creating art requires problem solving but art handling can be just as perplexing and satisfying. I doubt most artists consider the packing, shipping, installation, and storage logistics when producing their work. This results in a variety of interesting situations, some borderline absurd. For example, one 10 x 10 foot gesture drawing on paper might take half an hour to make, but to properly frame, crate, and ship it to an exhibition at a museum across the country could cost upwards of $20,000. As a preparator, I keep logistics in mind when making my own work. Notions of safe handling and secure storage have also added to my work’s conceptual value. In addition to art installation, I recently started a teaching position at the Cary Arts Center as a woodworking instructor. I look forward to helping students realize their creative potential through power tools.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to share – to communicate my story in a way that makes visible what usually goes unnoticed. With this visibility I hope to start a conversation about the complexities of human experience. Recently I’ve been assembling a body of work for a solo exhibition entitled HOME|BODY at Meredith College in Raleigh NC opening this September. Delving into the premise of this forthcoming show will help illustrate where I’m at right now with my goal of sharing.

At its core, the exhibition HOME|BODY is a collection of psychophysiological self-portraits of an adult man coping with the effects of his chronic traumatic childhood environment. The word “homebody” can be defined as a person who likes to stay at home, especially one who is perceived as unadventurous. Dividing the term down the center, physically and conceptually breaks it into the words “home” and “body” while still alluding to their compound form. This semantic fragmentation reflects what can happen to the human mind-body complex in the presence of traumatic stress.

A functional home provides bodily safety, emotional reassurance, and stable identity among other indispensable resources for healthy childhood development. A broken home amplifies the dangers of the outside world. A young child lacks the ability to defend or advocate for themselves. As they grow up in a chaotic environment, they do what they must to survive – fawn, flee, fight, or freeze. They people please, run and hide, kick and scream, or their body shuts down to prepare for death. Over the years, these survival tactics are internalized, the chaotic home embodied, and the experience of self is left in fragments. If the traumatized child is fortunate enough to survive and mature into an outwardly successful adult, their body still houses the fragments of childhood self. Like any shrapnel, these either remain deeply embedded or slip, slide, and split their way up through the visible surface. Such revealing moments, whether public or private, risk triggering old survival tactics and cause embarrassment that generates new traumatic events, perpetuating the cycle.

While many effective therapeutic methods exist to help adults heal from childhood trauma, the process can take years or decades. Even though I am an artist and not a mental health professional, I believe there is hope for recovery. Making artwork about my own experience feels therapeutic to some extent, but it is neither art therapy nor is it a substitute for traditional psychotherapy. The works of HOME|BODY serve as a map – an abstraction of complex feelings and difficult moments of former self extracted from lived experience, suspended in time, and viewed from a safe distance. Perhaps with this map I can begin to understand my complicated emotional terrain and establish reorienting landmarks in an historically unstable landscape. By exhibiting this work, I honor my fragments and share my map in progress. Do you recognize a landmark, a feeling, or a facet? Do you notice any moments where our maps overlap? What do you do with your fragments of lived experience? How do we, despite our differences, disadvantages, obstacles, and privileges work toward piecing together an equitable community, safe homes, and thriving bodies?

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Financially support artists. Give artists money so that they can meet their basic needs without sacrificing their art practice. Artist Grants, fellowships, and prizes help, but they can be incredibly competitive with a high barrier to entry. I personally struggle with writing proposals, investing precious time and money for application fees with a slim chance of return. Most working-class creatives generate culture that society benefits from in some way. Why should access to funding remain so selective?

I am a proponent of a federally implemented universal basic income. I believe that every individual has creative potential and access to resources shouldn’t be contingent upon class or any other demographic. If a guaranteed basic income reduced survival stressors, freeing up time to explore, we’d solve more problems, make more art, and everyone would benefit.     

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nathangrimesfineart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathandgrimes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nathangrimes1035/videos
• Other: https://linktr.ee/nathangrimes

Image Credits
Kendra Ward, Alisha Dusty