Harry Grundy: FULL PELT
Incubator is pleased to present Full Pelt, a solo exhibition by Harry Grundy that transforms repetition from industrial rhythm into a language of care. Working across sandpaper drawings, chance-based interventions, and elemental installations, Grundy excavates the inheritances - familial, material, coastal - embedded in patient, process-driven labour.
The exhibition's central thesis unfolds through friction. Grundy's sandpaper drawings emerge from dragging wood across coarse grain at speeds ranging from 3,000 RPM to barely moving. Some employ belts inherited from a friend who happens to be a woodworker; others bear thick, Jupiter-like bands produced on the original belt sanding machine. The resulting patterns of olive, maple and rosewood inscribed into textile-like grids echo the shuttle and loom whilst invoking the Luddites' revolt against mechanised replacement in the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. But where the Luddites smashed machines, Grundy redirects their resistance, using the belt sander’s own rhythm to create patterns that honour craft rather than erase it.
That question of straight lines haunts the work. Standing at the beach behind Turner Contemporary, Grundy and his father looked up at contrails scored across the sky. "What would Turner have done with all these straight lines?" his father asked. The question becomes a guiding thread. In Finding a Six (Two Turners) (2026), Grundy rolls hand-carved chalk dice into the North Sea until a six appears, collapsing 70 million years of geological formation into seconds of chance-driven action. The moon's tides soften their numbers. Ritual answers the father's question through waiting rather than resolution.
Other dice drawings fix this logic to the wall: drawers turned sideways, books mounted onto them, dice settled at the bottom. Flights of Imagination, bound in blue, discusses avian adaptation across millennia - its bookcloth becoming backdrop for white chalk lines like those airplane’s contrails. Vanishing Paradise, in green, catalogues near-extinct species from twenty years ago, many now gone. Here the dice speak to industrial chance, how we gamble with guardianship. Blue sets the dice skyward; green grounds them on land.
In the quiet of the back room, Bed (2026) enacts tenderness through arrangement: two white tulips rest in an angled corian tray filled halfway with water drawn from the River Calder in Hebden Bridge. Their stems lie submerged, nourished and anchored, whilst their heads lean together like figures beneath a sheet. Water, plant, steel held in quiet co-dependence. And, in a final moment downstairs, Forever and Some (2020–) collates poems, ideas, and lists that resist visual form into an ongoing, unfinished document. Weighted by a lump of coal and marked by readers' sooty fingerprints, it thickens with accumulated trace - both private ledger and public archive.
Full Pelt positions repetition not as monotony but as revelation: a way of attending to material, memory, and place that refuses the logic of speed or easy resolution. Local in origin yet expansive in resonance, Grundy's work brings a regional voice into central London, his soft geometries clarifying against the gallery's own angles and folds. Through abrasion and patience, inheritance becomes active, industrial process becomes meditation, and labour reveals itself as care.
