Lucy is an Artist-Curator based in Coventry.

Current research explores how drawing practices can function as a curatorial tool for self-organisation and spatial justice, opening architectures that are porous and leaky rather than fixed.

Drawing here is planetary: an orbital system rather than a static form, where relations, failures, and repetitions gather into the stellar nebula, intersecting Critical Spatial Practice, queer bodies, planetary systems, and DIY building practices.

Lucy Grubb
Lucymaria883@gmail.com
https://lucygrubb.org/

Studio Collaborations is a curatorial project in which the ‘studio visit’ itself becomes a curatorial tool. This project invites artists into my studio, where I curate their artwork within my studio mess.

Central to this project are conversations around materials, and indexicality, particularly in relation to drawing practices, building practices, and lo-fi curatorial methodologies.

If you are interested in being part of this project - email me :))!

Curatorial Statement x research x how it works?

1.
uhhmmmmmmm (HERE)
Written preliminary as part of Talking Birds, The Nest Residency, Coventry
September - October 2025.

2.
Studio Collaborations:
working text

Coventry hardly has any spaces for temporary exhibitions. Infrastructures feel paused... are paused. These Studio Collaborations come from that absence. Without a project space, without a gallery, without institutional support, without funding, the studio becomes the only available site I have to hold onto. Not by default, but by necessity.

This project grows out of flatGROUND (2022–2023), a curatorial project (turned method) that happened during my commute to work as a Library Assistant while I worked in CCC funded Libraries. I didn’t have a studio then, but I did have my commute, and boredom. I would ask friends for artworks, and would compose them in the cities pre-existing architectures as I walked to the various Libraries I worked in.

Now, (since April 2025) I have a studio, in Coventry. What the studio offers me is what a project space cannot. My studio offers its own contours of (un)making: a site for drawing, thinking, architectural models, conversations, drinking, drifting. A room with its own temperature. A room that can host, but also refuse. (Everything I want my studio to be).

In this very real absence of exhibition infrastructure, the studio becomes, to me, both a curatorial tool and a dilemma:
Is this the place to make, or the place to dismantle?
A site of invitation, or a site of orbiting around others?
The impulse to invite others in feels curatorial, but also orbital: a desire to gather, to drift around other practices, to form small gravitational fields of mutual thinking.

I want people to visit the studio because I want to meet people, and form these small gravitational fields. But every invitation is conditional. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, the visitor is never neutral. The host shapes the terms of entry.

So I’ve been wondering how to undo this visitor 'problem': 
How do I keep the welcome from hardening into expectation? 
How do I keep your body from being folded into my rhetorics, my wants, my dreams, my likes?
How do I make space without presuming your embodiment, your pace, your materials?
How do I as 'host' unlearn and remake the poetics of space, the atmosphere, the temperature of belonging.

Perhaps when you enter my studio, I enter your work. 
Perhaps I become the visitor.  What would it mean for my space to become warm inside yours?

But, welcome is never neutral. 
It leans.  It orientates.  It asks the visitor to bend with it.

Ruth once told me about Granite — a text by Ursula Le Guin and because I like stones, I listened.  Granite is what the studio already feels like: cold, hard, unwilling.

So I ask myself: 
How can I become more like what granite is not - like mud? 
How can I stay porous in a room that wants to calcify? 
How can I refuse the geological conviction of “host”?

The studio never starts where I left it.  Rearranging itself overnight, and through my slight line drawings, and studio days where nothing but sitting is achieved.

The studio remains misaligned: too private to be public, too chaotic to be neutral, too bodily to pretend it’s a gallery (because it is not). But misalignment is why this is a Studio Collaboration, and not an exhibition.

This studio is re-conceived as a soft demolition site, where residues of previous work, previous studio holders, previous thinking, previous fatigue settle across the carpeted floorboards.

To invite someone into the studio is to ask: 
How does your orbit alter mine? 
How does my demolition meet your drawing? 
What spatial conditions move between us?

Studio Collaborations become gravitational arrangements rather than display-making.
Fragments attracting, repelling, gathering into constellations.

Enter anyway.

Perhaps we become visitors to each other.
Perhaps that is the work.

3.
How this works, currently? (but I am keen to change this way of working to accommodate other methods + needs + interests + geographical locations). Also, think about 2hrs max.

- Come to my studio :))!

- Bring with you artwork / images / something that interests you..

- Lets chat about interesting + exciting things together (I have tea + snacks)!

- Curate artwork around my studio (which may bring up new ideas, materials or provocations, which really interests me via indecixality, and material associations).

- Documentation (probs photos..)

- Take ur artwork home!

( + if you can’t physically come along to the studio but would still like to be part of this, I am thinking that small artwork would be posted to me, and then we have a 40min zoom call together in the studio.. And, I will post the work back to you.)

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STUDIO COLLABORATIONS Curated by Lucy Grubb EP01—Jacob Carter EP02—Emily Scarrott EP03—Carolyn Morton EP04—Matt PageEP05—Saba Qizilbash

STUDIO COLLABORATIONS
Curated by Lucy Grubb

EP01—Jacob Carter
EP02—Emily Scarrott
EP03—Carolyn Morton
EP04—Matt Page
EP05—Saba Qizilbash