Harry Grundy’s new works on sandpaper are drawn at 3,000RPM

Harry Grundy’s work has always been material-led, steered by smart, upside down ideas that challenge the use of everyday objects and tools. The artist has moved around quite a bit: relocating his life to West Yorkshire to spend more time writing and walking in 2021, and then uprooting again to move to the English coastal town of Margate a few years later (where the artist is now based), and the fruits of Harry’s work are “often rooted in place”, he tells us.

His time spent working in a studio “just thirty seconds from the sea” on this corner of the coast, for example, birthed the idea for his chalk dice pieces: dice carved carefully from local cliffs. After being thrown into the sea, the sculptural works are returned back up on the shore by waves, lovingly weathered by the moon – you might have been lucky enough to come across one on a walk down Margate’s beaches.

Harry has found himself embarking on more material-based experiments recently: this time a series of drawings on sandpaper. The seed for which was sown in 2024 when the artist’s dad and “his oldest mate Dave, cleared out the shed of Dave’s dad, Steve Wing”, Harry says. Formerly an avid woodworker, Steve’s store of tools and supplies for toy and furniture making over the course of his career needed a new home. “I knabbed loads of great stuff; a lathe, benchtop belt sander, a tiny pocket-size anvil,” Harry says. “Oddly though, the most exciting find was a box of hundreds of sandpaper sheets.”

Struck by the sheer variety of the stuff – all the diverse and unusual forms one the humble tool could take, from “soft blue Japanese sheets made with ceramic particles, Spanish orange paper with lovely lettering that peeks through the translucent grit and small belts for the machine that curled up like animals”, he came away a big bag of unusual offcuts, and an idea. The artist wanted to create drawings on sandpaper, so he took his supplies to an artist residency in New Hampshire, run by Bianca Roden, to spend the next two weeks “scratching away and finding a style that suited the specific material,” he says.

After a few fun discoveries and experiments, unveiling gloriously earthy palettes from rosewood, maple and olive wood on all kinds of grits, Harry began to explore drawing with larger machines last year. Treating belt sanders as his rotating canvases, the artist has created a range of drawings at 3,000rpm that look like sunsets, with soft gradients of colour that seep into one another. Other pieces have been made at a slower speed, over the course of a day and by hand in Harry’s studio, many of which have taken on the appearance of textiles or sewing patterns. This loom-like motion drawing motion of pulling the wood back and forth across the paper to mark strong lines, “borrows something from the textile mills in West Yorkshire, near to where I sourced some of the additional wood”, the artist says.

The near two year long project has given Harry the joy of “creating something sensitive and slow from something biting and fast”, he says. “They say that some of the safest jobs in a post-AI world are the ‘skilled trades’ although I don’t think this is exactly what they meant,” he adds. This slow, manual making has had “a kind of liberating irrelevance” to it all, he says. A bit of a refuge from the world, the artist‘s studio has become – “a place where making a drawing with sandpaper is the most important thing”, and in the process of bringing together the series, secluded him entirely from digital noise. “That feels very healthy to me, because it’s slightly absurd and entirely mine,” he ends. “I love that it has taken nearly two years to scratch wood into sandpaper, I’m proud of this strange use of time.”

The sandpaper series has since been on display at The Incubator Gallery in London in the artist’s solo show Full Pelt, curated by Angelica Jopling. Now in the run up to his next show Harry is set to put a selection of the works up on show in an exhibition with Rachel Mortlock at New Art Projects in Islington, opening on the 23 April 2026.