Oona Grimes is a London based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing, clay making & film.

During Grimes’ 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School at Rome she segued from thieving Lorenzetti tartans and cartoon detail from Etruscan paintings, to the appropriation of neorealist films – mis-remembered, imitated and low tech re- enacted: a physical drawing of herself captured on i-phone.

Recent works include ‘The mighty dead…woo woo’ [01.5min i.phone film]2020 ’Etruscan moth’ [i.phone film 04.51 min]2020 & ‘Horsepolish’ [09.00 min S16mm & digital] 2021.

Horsepolish :
De Sica meets Dr Barnardo at the Ragged School Museum.
In what plays as an outtake from some larger narrative, Horsepolish returns to the marginalised and the overlooked. The work of scrubbing and polishing calls up ghosts, enacting past stories. Street children – whether of Barnardo or de Sica’s era – conjure dreams of empowerment & freedom from the reality of their daily Sisyphean task.

“…the fictional spaces of cinema become another resonant layer of history embedded in the architecture of the Ragged School Museum.” – Lucy Reynolds