Wiregrass Museum of Art welcomes artist Jamey Grimes back to the Museum with Roil: Tempest, a larger-scale, site-specific installation that builds upon his earlier presentation of Roil in 2012.
Grimes’ work explores the intersection of art, science, and the natural world, transforming synthetic materials into immersive sculptural environments that evoke the movement and turbulence of natural forces. His installations accumulate and expand to surround the viewer, creating an experience that is at once unsettling and serene. For Roil: Tempest, Grimes draws inspiration from the powerful forces of nature and, specifically, the tornado activity that impacted
Paint Rock Forest Research Center in 2025. Rather than directly depicting a tornado, the installation responds to the turbulence, destruction, and transformation associated with the event. Grimes was particularly moved by the Center’s decision to approach the damage as an opportunity to learn more about the forest’s adaptability and recovery—an attitude that reflects his own interest in nature’s capacity to both destroy and regenerate.
Returning to Wiregrass Museum more than a decade after his first exhibition, Grimes expands the work into a new site-specific environment designed specifically for the Museum.
The installation invites visitors to consider their own relationship to natural forces and the ways we attempt to understand, organize, and make meaning from the world around us. Working from his background in both biology and sculpture, Grimes draws on scientific observation and the patterns of the natural world to create forms that blur the boundaries between the organic and the manufactured.
With a career spanning more than 100 exhibitions across nearly 20 states, Grimes has exhibited widely throughout the Southeast and beyond. He is a 2019 South Arts State Fellowship recipient and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Visual Arts Fellowship recipient.
