Grace Culley
“On Surprised face; Heart eyes”

West Space Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones speaks with artist Grace Culley on her 2023 West Space Commission, Surprised face; Heart eyes. They spoke during the development process of the exhibition.

Sebastian Henry-Jones: Can you describe the exhibition? What kinds of materials have you used, and what narratives and subject matters do they contain?

Grace Culley: For the show I’m wanting to present different experiences through the lens of dopamine, looking at them within the broader context of morality and Western value systems, to reconsider the ways that certain experiences and their behaviours are perceived as taboo.

I’m in the process of making five works, and the materials involved – ones that I've used quite consistently in the couple of years since finishing uni – are the biro pen on paper, and newspaper pulp on a steel frame. I thought I’d use those materials in this show for the more personal works connected to my experience of love and Tourette's.

I started using some new materials as a kind of analogy, for the works that are looking at things outside of my own experience. For these I’ve worked with carbon fibre and fibreglass, used in combination with a new process for me, which involves stripping and rusting the steel. I’ve used steel pretty consistently to make shapes that you’d commonly see in wrought iron fencing, gates, doors and balustrades. That’s been quite a dominant motif for me since third year uni (2020). I like working with the steel brackets because they bend while still holding their shape. A lot of people in my family are engineers. My dad had a mechanics in the UK, which I think informs my preference for industrial materials.

I used an airbrush for one of the works as well. I have a little one that dad gave me for my fifteenth birthday. The work I used it for is really big, and I've made it overheat a few times because it's only a hobbyist’s size.

SHJ: Can you tell me a little bit about dopamine – why is it often called the 'surprise reward' chemical, and how come have you made it a central concern of your show?

GC: Dopamine is a chemical that’s produced in the brain, and responsible for making you feel good essentially. It’s often referred to as the ‘reward’ chemical, because it gets released when you’re doing something pleasurable or satisfying. Dopamine also helps nerve cells to send messages to each other…like synapses, and signals jumping across the gap between one neuron and another. A lot of the different conditions that people live with involve their dopamine levels being affected in different ways, whether it is the amount of receptors that someone's brain naturally contains – less due to the effects of substance abuse for example – or Tourette’s of which I’m of the opinion that it’s super sensitive. Because it gives you a good feeling, you can start having cravings for more dopamine, which often leads to behaviours widely considered ‘antisocial.’

A fair amount of people seem to think that dopamine’s just a reward chemical. But my research has taught me – and this is quite important to understand – in the way that it informs behaviour, it's more specifically a surprise-reward that responds to feelings of novelty. Over time you can build up a tolerance. If you get given the same thing as a gift each birthday for example, it no longer sparks as high a dopamine response as the first time.

I wanted to look at this because, having Tourette's, I move quite constantly through cycles of craving, and then satisfying that craving. It’s that reward response... I'm not sure how it is for other people living with Tourette's, but to me satisfying that craving is like a momentary state of euphoria. There's euphoria, and then once the survival part of the brain that's been craving that feeling gets satisfied, the logical part of your brain turns on and it's like, ‘oh, why did you do it again?’

SHJ: And so it’s not just about other people making an evaluation of your behaviour, but about evaluating your own behaviour?

GC: Yeah, and I think that makes it this very frustrating, public relationship that dopamine-diverse people have with themselves. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine affect behaviour because it can lead to involuntary things like a lack of impulse control.

SHJ: What does a focus on dopamine as it occurs across broader society reveal?

GC: It reveals patterns of behaviour and how we see them. I think humans are constantly self-critical about small instances of losing control, whether that be exemplified in, you know, the diet culture of the 2000s and 2010s where people felt a sense of shame for eating more chocolate than they usually would. Or TikTok today, a technology in which algorithms are designed to keep you scrolling by showing slight variations of a thing that is attractive to you.

With the exhibition I want to demonstrate that the different issues all of us experience, while difficult in their unique ways, are very much relative to each other. I want to show how stigmatised our struggles with control are on a large scale. I call it having a ‘dopamine-centric worldview’, which allows me to see the thing that's hidden in plain sight – the way we each live within our own patterns of behaviour.

SHJ: Maybe you could explain your research method for this project. How did you collect the data that you're using to make these works?

GC: With the help of a Creator’s Fund from Creative Victoria, I undertook this conversation-based research to look at all the different ways that dopamine exists – in the body but also in social or cultural situations. I wanted to research quite a few discrete conditions and experiences so that I could go into my making as responsibly as possible. It wasn’t initially my intention to approach people with a particular experience in mind, but the way it started out, I realised I had looked to define people by an assumed experience. It was profound to witness each person as an amalgamation of behaviours and experiences that dopamine is - and isn’t - responsible for, and that these behaviours complexly connect what’s inside to the outside.  Like…dopamine doesn’t exist in a vacuum in the brain, it exists in symbiosis with other things, like the neurotransmitters GABA and serotonin for example.

Often my conversations would just flow, and as I went further on, I realised that I should ask less questions and allow people the autonomy to bring things up. Often discussing one experience would lead to talking about another one, like someone who's experienced addiction, along with an eating disorder, along with ADHD. I like specificity, so the works that I’ve made are about drawing parallels and understandings between how I have interpreted particular accounts of people’s experiences. I use my understanding as a frame of reference, to understand and empathise. I’m not claiming that my renderings of certain conditions are universal, but that a universal thing that ties them together is dopamine. While there's so many other neurological, physical and social factors involved, maybe looking through the lens of dopamine is a way of understanding the consistencies and variations between different patterns of behaviour.

When I first wrote the application for the West Space commission, I thought the show would be quite didactic and self-explanatory, but now I see that none of the works are about just one thing. It’s much more open now, and I hope that people who don't feel like they have relatable experiences can still get something from the show. Talking to friends and acquaintances, I know that there are certain commonalities and biases that exist within one person's network or adjacent networks, and so the show isn’t making the claim to be universal, you know? There’s also the chance that I've misinterpreted some of my research as well. So it’s also my experience of hearing and perceiving other people's experiences. I can’t even claim to clinically understand them. It's my response to a qualitative process of observation and sharing.

SHJ: As an artist, how have you looked to historic representations of ‘antisocial’ behaviour in visual culture to communicate your own ideas about dopamine-diverse experiences, and the way they’re perceived in contemporary society?

GC: How do I communicate these abstract perceptions and standards? That was a big question for me. For the Tourette's work – which features a self-portrait of my body – I looked at what I know to be the first recorded instance of Tourette's in Western history, in the first witch-hunting book the Malleus Maleficarum, produced during the medieval period in Europe. I looked at stories of demons and the way they were written about, like fallen angels, things that came to do the bidding of Satan in human form. When my Tourette's feels extremely beyond my control it’s like being possessed. A tic of mine used to be bending really far backwards, and sometimes people would say to me ‘oh, you look like you’re from The Exorcist.’

I looked at how demons were represented in artworks of the time: things like faces on stomachs with long tongues and bulging eyes. I wanted to combine that kind of imagery with references to addictive social media use, which is why the image appears as a kind of softcore nude…bringing in ideas of being exposed or vulnerable. There’s something confessional about it that I like. Tourette’s sometimes gets called the ‘truth disorder’. Much like the medieval paintings, I feel like new technologies today and their use within mainstream media have mythologised people living with Tourette’s in a negative way.

SHJ: Making this body of work has been labour-intensive. Can you talk about the use of repetition and patterning in your practice? It seems to me that being a neurodivergent artist, the process of making is significant to you.

GC: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think I forget sometimes because those really laborious and repetitive processes are so natural to me now. I think it's something that came about during uni, where I started using process as a way to think through ideas and, you know, be either pondering something or healing something else. Like catharsis. As part of my funded activities with the Creator’s Fund, learning about the importance of physical modes of healing, like talking and being heard but especially different kinds of embodied therapies…they’re really important. As well as bodily knowledge and how the body has its own sense of how to process things. I think a greater awareness of this has led me to realise what my more laborious procedures do for me, being a process-focussed artist. I think because of my Tourette's I've come to focus on repetition as an important process. Sometimes it's nice to repeat things that are causing me physical strain and stress that aren’t tics. It's nice, externalising something through repetition.

SHJ: That’s an interesting question – how has having a creative practice changed your relationship to your own experience of dopamine?

GC: Without trying to instrumentalise it, over the last few years my practice has really started to focus on my Tourette’s. I think it helped me come to a point of greater understanding… It’s probably helped me to be more compassionate towards myself and starting the journey of  being okay with the things I can't control.

Looking at things through my creative practice has allowed me to be curious, and to admit that I don't know things. I used to, you know, just hear and subscribe to the opinion that Tourette's was high-dopamine. But then through my critical practice I learnt that it’s possibly just super sensitive to fluctuations in dopamine levels. Through that I formed my own opinion, which is important because I think the small attention afforded to Tourette’s really focuses on the cliché of rage – and I'm not denying that it’s present – but people focus on it because it’s an easy way to understand something that’s quite complex…

…Yeah, thinking about it through a lens of addiction – which is just looking at it through the lens of dopamine – I think it helps me understand that these things are really hard to control. Like don't beat yourself up about it. Doing this project has really helped me let go of any lingering prejudices that I held about other people. I live in Fitzroy, and there are a lot of people wandering around Brunswick Street who, sadly, some people look at strangely or with judgement or move to the other side of the street. These reactions are underpinned by the belief that those people did something to get themselves into a state of houselessness or  economic strife, and I just wish I could shout it from the rooftops, that the experiences I'm looking at are not a moral failing.

SHJ: Have you been making this body of work with a specific audience in mind?

GC: That question brings up things I've been thinking about quite a lot recently regarding different communities within the arts sector in Melbourne. Some of the newer galleries that attract the academically-trained artist….whilst they’re formally open to the general public they’re not necessarily inviting them in. I find that there’s an unspoken level of gatekeeping due to the academic approach, and that one needs to have a certain level of art education to understand how to be in those spaces. I was super excited by the opportunity to show at West Space because I think the organisation tries to mix being conceptually rigorous with being somewhat available to people who aren't artists.

What I think required a bit more intention was how to invite in those people who aren't artists. Thinking through dopamine… in an area like Collingwood which has a history of addiction, homelessness and substance abuse… the art crowd and the gallery space are so inhospitable to people who are a part of those histories. The two are hard to reconcile. A lot of the people I spoke to in my research probably wouldn’t feel comfortable in a gallery space either.

Through my practice, I've gotten the impression that some people who aren't artists really connect with ideas of beauty, which I see through my dopamine-centric worldview as a reward response because it feels good to look at something that we perceive as pleasurable. And so I like making things with a lot of detail that are highly rendered. Lots of artists aim to do different things with their art, whether it is to disturb their audience, or put people into a calm, contemplative state. I'm only realising this now, but maybe I make things that I perceive as visually intriguing and beautiful because my mind and body are geared towards pleasure-seeking. So, in that way the audience I had in mind is quite broad – broader than the regular art crowd – and connected by their different experiences of dopamine.

Through my conversations this project’s been really community driven. I really can't explain how heartwarming and gratifying it's been to connect with my community and others during the research phase. Just chatting with people, sharing and questioning things together. I hope that everyone feels like they can come to see the show.

SHJ: What kind of dopamine response are you hoping to engender in those who visit the exhibition?

GC: That makes me think of the sheer scale of quite a few of the works – I don’t know why but for this show I was driven to make things big big big. Maybe that will incite some kind of dopamine response? I'm not sure why humans are impressed by big things.

A lot of the sculptural works contain intriguing textures; that are prickly, or look like they're decaying, but also could be growing… somewhere between gross and beautiful. Some of the things I make – you know, the prickly textured things – I think that relates to dopamine and Tourette's for the way that sometimes, a thing can being so painful that it feels good. Some of the conversations I had were with people who are dominatrixes, and that is a really profound space where exposing oneself to physical or mental pain can be a release or a coping mechanism.

Often I just want people to touch the sculptures, or to come into the studio and feel the carbon fibre. That’s one way of engaging a dopamine response, but then it’s also completely subject to who walks in the door and the state of their dopaminergic system.

First published in Grace Culley: Surprised face; Heart eyes by Sontagg Press.