Artist Bio

Grace Summers’ practice explores identity, belonging and vulnerability through layered photographic imagery and material experimentation. Drawing together encounters with the body and the natural world, her works move between personal experience and the places through which an understanding of self takes shape. Forms overlap, become obscured and reappear, allowing the familiar to carry uncertainty. What is visible offers a partial account; beneath the surface lie connections that resist being fully revealed.

Grounded in her relationship with Tasmania, Summers approaches landscape through sustained observation and intimacy with place. Tangled vegetation, fallen leaves and changing light become points of connection, shaping a visual language informed by the environments she inhabits. Belonging develops through returning, noticing and recognising oneself within a place occupied by other lives.

In Vessels of a Breathing Place (2025) and Entangled Witness (2026), separate encounters accumulate within constructed landscapes, bringing small ecological details into relation with wider terrains. The circular compositions of Vessels of a Breathing Place invite intimate observations of the Tamar Wetlands, while Entangled Witness extends this enquiry through shifting scale, dense vegetation and partially concealed animal presences. Photographic layers unsettle the distinction between a landscape observed and one remembered. Vulnerability emerges through the tension between what these environments reveal and what remains beyond perception, connecting Summers’ sense of belonging with a responsibility towards the places and lives with which she shares a home.

Summers is completing her final year of a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Photography, at the University of Tasmania. Alongside her practice and studies, she works as a Teacher’s Assistant and Fine Arts Student Ambassador, supporting students in the classroom and encouraging engagement with creative education through school open days and university events. These roles extend her interest in how attentive encounters can shape understanding, connecting her practice with education.