The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Hettie Inniss

The British Caribbean artist is already considered one to watch, despite having only graduated with an MA in painting from the prestigious Royal College of Art last year (studying with a Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship and ColArt Winsor & Newton Bursary). By the end of 2023, Inniss had been dubbed one of “five new artists to know” by The Times; chosen for the ongoing Tate Collective young artist commission series; and gained representation with GRIMM—a gallery looking after an international roster of artists across its New York, Amsterdam, and London sites. She presented her first solo show with the gallery in London this past May.

Inniss’s rise is a reflection of her fresh, compelling work, which is known to play with the entangled relationship between memory and smell. Often, the artist harnesses the instability of memory through creating emotive pieces where the people, places, and things depicted fuse together, becoming almost indistinguishable from each other.

As a viewer, much of Inniss’s work may feel ambiguous in terms of what it’s trying to express. In London Feels Sad in the Rain (2024), from her last solo show, for example, we see a warm painting of what appears to be the exterior of a low-rise building with an open doorway. Trees appear to be growing in front of, behind, and even inside the structure. The other shapes on and around the building are barely intelligible, and stairs appear to be emerging from the roof. But this is just one possible interpretation. This openness to how her work can be understood is partially Inniss’s intention. “When I’m recollecting something, a lot of the time, the memory shifts and fades in and out,” she said. “It has this real instability, which I find exciting, and I try to put that into the work.”

Inniss’s show at GRIMM’s Mayfair location, which coincided with London Gallery Weekend, presented the artist with a new challenge. For group shows, she said, artists send their pieces to a gallery or institution, and the location where artworks are placed curatorially is often a “big surprise.” However, Inniss’s solo show, “Rememories from the Floating World,” was the first time she could think about her work “in context with itself.”

“It’s a fun task because you think certain paintings will work together when you’re in the studio,” she said. “But when you put them together in the gallery space, you’re like, ‘That looks awful.’”

When I met Inniss, she was returning to work after taking time off post–solo show. After any break from painting, it takes time to get “to grips with remembering how I do things,” she said. Inniss sees smell as one of her “most predominant senses.” Perfume, food, petrol, and coffee are only some aromas that spark strong feelings for her. She then spends time reflecting on what a smell could be reminding her of, before sketching from those experiences and memories. “It’s quite a meditative process.”

This approach of bridging the gap between her senses, memories, and creative impulses was handy when Tate Collective—Tate’s scheme for 16-to-25-year-olds—commissioned Inniss to respond to a piece in any of the Tate collections. Inniss explained that she was skeptical of responding to a painting with a painting, so she decided to walk around Tate Britain and “see what came out of it.”

She felt Paul Maheke’s Mutual Survival, Lorde’s Manifesto (2015) before she saw it. The bass of the music in the piece—a two-channel video installation centered around dance and filmed in an East London community center—resonated with her “sensory-driven practice.”

“I let myself sit with it for a while, and I was excited about how finding the artwork naturally happened,” Inniss said. The piece she created was an untitled work that “revels in the unreliability of memory,” as she told Tate Collective at the time.

Inniss’s journey to her current artistic practice traces back to her initial interest in design. Before starting a BA in art and design at the University of Leeds in 2019, she briefly worked at a kitchen design company. There, she enjoyed “experimenting with a brief,” she said. “But what I loved about art was that it didn’t have to necessarily appeal to something or someone—there was freedom to it.” While she acknowledged that design might be something she revisits in the future, right now she is considering different ways of approaching her current work.

Inniss’s upcoming show in GRIMM’s New York space, taking place from October 25th through December 7th, will be based on “smells that I’ve experienced just on my day-to-day,” she explained. She points to one such work in the studio, an unfinished canvas that she plans to title Everything Soup.

The painting is based on a soup of the same name that Inniss’s dad cooked for her growing up, made from “old veg and anything else left in the fridge,” she said. During a recent visit to the Serpentine Galleries, the smell of someone’s lunch reminded her of the soup. “So there’s going to be the architecture of the space and soup-esque shapes happening,” she explained.

Further down the line, Inniss is considering expanding her current work by creating sensory experiences. She’s thought about incorporating the actual smells that inspire her paintings into the exhibition space, or potentially working with sound or collaborating with a musician. “I’d like to see how those conversations between me and someone with a different medium would work,” she said. “With many of the marks and movement I’m creating, there is sound and rhythm to it.” It’s an exciting prospect for the promising painter—that perhaps, in the future, we may hear or smell Inniss’s work before we see it.