Grant x Wilkes - a collaboration
Grant x Wilkes is a collaborative partnership between artists Claire Grant and Lee Wilkes that explores the evolving relationship between image, material, and process. A deep curiosity for photographic experimentation and material innovation drives their work, pushing the photograph beyond its traditional boundaries. By combining analogue and digital processes, they merge historical craftsmanship with contemporary research. Their collaborative practice is rooted in shared intent, reflecting the dynamics of working partners and the possibilities that arise from mutual trust.
As solo artists Grant x Wilkes have exhibited extensively in public institutions, national art prizes, and private galleries throughout Australia. Collaboratively they have been finalists in the 2021 Milburn Art Prize for Landscape, and their portrait ‘Homecoming’ won both the Packer’s Prize and the Metro Arts Experimental Prize at the 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize. Their recent solo exhibition ‘Local Guide’ was exhibited at Loupe Creative Space in Brisbane.
Grant x Wilkes solo exhibition Local Guide at Loupe Creative Space, November 2025
Both playful and disquieting, Local Guide questions the reliability of online knowledge in an age of surveillance capitalism, where data is mined, images are automated, and trust is commodified. Through a series of fabricated suburban landmarks entered into Google Maps, Grant x Wilkes mischievously assumes the role of everyday users who shape our digital landscapes, exposing the fragility of the mapped world and the quiet seduction of believing what we see online. We freely exchange our virtual privacy for the conveniences we consume; services offered up by hungry platforms eager for more content to feed machine learning and train artificial intelligence systems.
Grant x Wilkes translates the immaterial traces of the online world into physical form, drawing on a combination of digital photography, painting, 3D photogrammetry, and experimental analogue photographic processes. Each work probes the aesthetics of truth and the seduction of the photographic image. Local Guide is an irreverent game of trickery played against the algorithms that harvest our personal data and demand our constant undivided attention.