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-My art and my motivation for making my
my art is about body liberation,
♪♪
which to me means attempting to create safety
and belonging for everyone, for all bodies.
What I see my work doing is making a space
where we can acknowledge the truth
of human variation.
My name is Grace Athena Flott.
I'm a visual artist, primarily
working in paint.
I work mostly with oil paint on canvas,
and I also do a bit of printmaking.
So I went to University of Washington.
I was on a path to go into, economic and labor policy.
The thing that tipped me towards art or returned me
to it, was the major injury that I experienced.
When I was 20 years old, I was on a study abroad
program in Paris, France,
and I was injured in this apartment fire.
I sustained injuries, burn injuries
over, like, half of my body and also skeletal injuries.
I was in recovery in the hospital
for two full months, and part of that was in Paris.
and then I was
medically evacuated back
to Harborview Medical Center here in Seattle.
An event that just totally changed
how I thought
about myself and how people perceived me.
That experience of like waking up in
a different physical reality
made me realize that I didn't see
any bodies like mine in media,
and it turned me towards this kind of like, search for,
meaning and belonging.
After I went to the University of Washington,
I then, like, went back to school a few years later
to learn to draw and paint the figure in portrait.
And that was at Gage Academy of Art.
So I studied for four years and in an Atelier,
which is the French word for workshop,
and it's a type of education modeled after
the kind of 19th century academic painters
who would train students in their studio.
I was attracted to that because it, to me, realism
is a very powerful mode of communication.
This is an amazing, storytelling tool.
I got these technical chops.
And then when I got out, I realized that,
you know, everything I learned was amazing and so useful.
And at the same time, it was really rooted
in a particular time period, and a particular philosophy
around what types of bodies are worthy of being portrayed.
Being me and
knowing, like my friends and my community of people
who might have burn injuries or just really anybody
we don't really fit into, like an idealized version.
♪♪
I think about my work as, kind of broadening
the image of what is normal So I think a lot about
whose body has value in society.
Who gets to belong?
Who gets to decide?
And what that looks like.
So I started a project called New Icons,
and it's a collaborative portrait project with people
in my community with visible scarring from burn injuries.
And it started because
I was looking for my own visual history.
and I just started talking to
friends and I said, I know how to paint people.
And do you want to be in a painting?
I think that you are worthy of being in a painting
and people were interested.
It just started with one person and grew from there.
I know that
a few people that I painted, it was the first time
anyone even photographed them since their injury.
Many of us can relate to feeling othered in some way.
That doesn't have to be about, even necessarily
how you look.
I recently had two paintings acquired
by the Port of Seattle
to be displayed at SeaTac International Airport.
And it's two paintings from the new Icons
portrait project.
portraiture is part
of the storytelling piece that I'm interested in.
People are powerful and they tell a story.
Everyone's face tells a story.
I'm interested really
in the map of the surface of the body
and what that says about someone's history
and who they are.
So someone one day
to sent me this call for art.
And it was to paint the portrait of
Governor Jay Inslee.
And I just thought, wow.
Okay, well, I paint portraits,
and I've lived in Washington since I was four years old,
east of the mountains and west of the mountains,
just like him.
I applied and
interviewed. I met the governor.
I met first lady Trudi Inslee.
I met his team.
Two weeks later, we were doing a photo shoot.
So it was very fast paced.
Overall, like the process really mirrored
the way that I work for most portrait commissions,
which is we started with like a big conversation
about the vision.
How do you want to be portrayed?
What's most important to you,
in this case, about your legacy?
And then we take that and go into the photo shoot,
take 700 photos, and then I select kind of the top images.
And with Inslee, what I did is a tiny
or like a small digital version of the big painting.
And then I took the painting
and took about seven weeks start to finish.
The painting was unveiled in January
2025 when he left office when he retired.
Huge unveiling at the Capitol building in Olympia.
Over 200 people were there.
I could not have asked for a better opportunity.
To do the kind of work that I have done
being an artist, we try so hard to get our work
validated in the public sphere.
And that's really meaningful to me.
I was lucky enough to get another commission,
to paint the retired
Washington State University president, Kirk Schulz,
and I just finished the painting.
It's about to be framed and delivered.
I'm in a kind of exploratory period.
So this is the scar patttern enlarged with the screen print.
I am starting to hit on bringing in like, plants
and nature more into the work.
We see disfigurement and disability
quite often in nature.
And I also see my scar patterns,
like the particular shapes from my body replicated
in cracked earth, in riverbeds, in tree bark.
I just finished
a painting called “Washing with the Roots”.
It's kind of an altar piece
about healing through a connection to water
or your ancestors and place.
The figure is printed with these things
I call scar prints,
by rolling ink on the skin
and then pressing paper and pulling a print.
And the balsamroot is a plant that is really meaningful to me.
It not only grew everywhere
around where I'm from in Spokane,
but it is really resistant and resilient in a wildfire.
And, as a burn survivor, that means a lot to me.
One thing that's important to me
to continue working with the figure,
as long as we have a kind of body
hierarchy in our world, like the figure
will continue to be political
and really important.
I feel like I can speak the loudest
about what it means to go through a major
change to one's body and not only survive,
but turn it into something that is creative.
And can carry me into the future.
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