Da Costa studied art in Johannesburg, where she was born and lived until recently. Her creative journey began in graphic, signage, and typographic design.
Her interest in sculpture developed when she began lost-wax bronze casting of small figures, and over several decades, her style expanded into a range of themes. Grace has explored the making of clothed and naked human figures and their composition in space at various scales, whether as singular pieces or in grouped arrangements. She has also painted figurative and abstract works on canvas while facilitating a regular evening figurative painting group in her studio in Parktown Johannesburg, an alternative to the group classes held at the Johannesburg Art Foundation.
Recent exhibited sculptural works explore negative space, rhythm, and texture, as well as the emotional content of the body, whether it be in aggregated arrangements such as in ‘The Spaces Between’ or ‘Schoolgirls and Boys’ series, abstracted as in ‘The Sentinels’, or individually posed figures like ‘Menina’, or ‘Girl with Bird’.
‘The Sentinels’ explores the emotion and weathering accompanying experience and age. The texture is emphasized, creating the roadmap drawn by the trials and tribulations of life, capturing an essence of acceptance, tolerance, knowledge, patience, and nostalgia for things of the past—the protectors and keepers of the tribe. Menina, Girl with Bird, Forever Young, Migration of the Cherry Blossom, etc., refer to works across the ages to works like Degas’ Little Dancer and Velasquez’s Las Meninas and speak to the contentions and states of grace embedded in childhood and unbiddable qualities that precede reason. In her Schoolgirl and Boys-themed works, she purposefully uses simplified, childlike renditions of these figures, exploring rhythm in placing figures reminiscent of a musical score.
According to Grace, the topics that particularly intrigue her focus on the personas we adopt and the attitudes and vulnerabilities accompanying life stages. From the ingénue to the craggy, worn, and weathered, her work is an inquiry into interpersonal relationships and individual attitudes. Da Costa’s work elicits different conversations, making them distinctive and unique.
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Actual colours may vary slightly from the images shown due to lighting when photographed and colour variations on monitors and phone screens.
