SPOTLIGHT: Meet the healing artist Grace Gee

Artist Grace Gee

Grace Gee’s healing art expresses the outermost edges of the innermost condition of being human. She creates art that challenges the mind and nourishes the spirit while providing avenues to engage in a changing consciousness. Her art holds space for vulnerability to exist.

She is the owner of Healing Grace Studio and works in a variety of media including sculpture, fiber, artist books and installation. Her art practice includes producing social healing art events for all ages since 2003. Her unique approach to life, art, and healing is strongly informed by her BA in Psychology and an MA in Conscious Evolution. She has exhibited across the US, in both group and solo exhibitions. Her award-winning work has brought her invitations to exhibitions, artist residencies, interviews and publishing.

Grace is Chinese Canadian now residing in Louisville, Colorado. She has lived and worked in Canada, the US and Hong Kong and has traveled widely in Europe and Asia. Her work is influenced by her bi-cultural upbringing and is strongly rooted in spiritual growth, healing, and transformation.

“Apprised, a Retrospective” incorporates community written flags of indicators of both toxic and healthy relationships. Being aware of red flags and identifying green flags helps us choose who to give our love, time, and energy to in a healthy way. “Healing Grace”is a series of thread sculptures of human organs that were affected during life-threatening septic shock. Working with each organ was integral to my healing process.

“Renewal” uses dried botanicals as a canvas to explore protection, liberation, reinvention and the beauty, form and flow in movement. Renewing seed pods is a delightful collaboration with the natural world. “Bubbling Up” is a social justice project that invites the BIPOC community to write stories of racism and injustice on spherelike units representing the bubbles people sometimes live in when they are sheltered from these experiences.

When did you first consider yourself an artist?

I’ve been creative for as long as I remember. I began to consider myself an artist when I moved from Canada to the US and focused primarily on creating art. There isn’t one project or piece that stands out as a turning point, it was more of a slow process of working consistently and then exhibiting consistently and coming into myself as an artist that way.

How has your bicultural upbringing influenced your art?

I’ve lived in Asia, Canada and the US and travelled extensively throughout Europe. The variety of people and cultures I’ve been exposed to provide a wide perspective on human behavior and what is common about how we navigate our feelings and our lives. While my circumstances may be unique to me, the emotions that are brought forth in my art are a collective experience I share with my viewer. My art is an invitation to find connection with yourself, your personal healing, and my truths I share through art.

Why is incorporating healing in your art important to you?

Creating art that is sourced from personal experience has the power to heal. Whether through movement, sound, visual art, storytelling or any way to creatively express ourselves, art has the ability to bypass the cognitive thinking brain and speak directly to, and from the heart. We can process, understand, and express emotions through art. My art has always had a healing and narrative theme to it and as I learn to take my pain and transform it through my art, I hear that viewers were finding relief and healing as well. As a society, we have so much healing to do. Trauma, unresolved grief and the collective pain around world events reverberates through us as individuals as well as through our communities. Anything that can be done to begin to heal this, to ease the pain, will benefit us collectively. It’s my hope that my work contributes to this healing.

What projects are you working on or looking forward to?

In the studio, I continue to stitch and weave on dried botanicals as part of the series of renewing myself as I renew the seed pods that nature has discarded when their job of protecting the seeds is done. I’m experimenting with different pods and techniques so that is very fun and always exciting. I am also focused on Bubbling Up, my social justice healing art project that invites all voices of the community to participate in collaborative art-making with personal expression. With incidents of racist and xenophobic violence and discrimination rising, community healing is needed now more than ever. People of the global majority are invited to write their stories of racism, discrimination, harassment or injustice on individual bubble-like forms. People not writing bubbles are invited to respond to the stories that are read on the bubbles. Stories and responses gathered will be part of a larger art installation amplifying voices and lived experiences, heard and witnessed.

I’ve been taking Bubbling Up to large public events and smaller private events and am very pleased with the engagement and the conversations that are coming from people’s participation.

In November, both my fine art and a sample of Bubbling Up is on exhibit at the Louisville Public Library. I’ll be there gathering stories and responses during First Friday Art Walk on Nov. 4 from 5pm-7pm, and also on Tuesday, Nov. 8 and Wednesday, Nov. 16 from 3pm-6:30pm. Next April the full display of Bubbling Up will be displayed on the second floor of the library.

If you can’t make a story-gathering event but still want to participate, anyone can submit a story through my website (healinggracestudio.com), and it will be written on a bubble and included in the exhibit. Contact me if you’re interested in having Bubbling Up at your event or organization.

Follow me for upcoming events or exhibits on Tiktok: @healinggrace studio or Instagram: @gracegeeart.