It’s a facet of the LA-born, London-raised artist that’s been ingrained in her since childhood, shaped by her artistic parents and their nomadic lifestyle. But all of these formative moments have come together to make an artist who can tackle anything life throws at her.
It all begins with the literal meaning of ‘heavy hair’, which was something a young Grace pondered a lot. Mockingly modelling the titular barnet of flowing brown locks to Dork over Zoom from her LA homestead, she’s quick to offer up a childhood insight. “I used to draw these women with hair that dragged on the floor, that was weighing them down, and I would bring them to my mum and be like, ‘This is how I feel’,” she recalls. “My emotions are in my hair, and it’s pulling my head down.”
While this is quite the, er, heavy scene to paint, these drawings were stored away by Grace’s mum and resurfaced a couple of years ago. Upon seeing them, she realised nothing much had changed. “I thought, like, wow, that’s still how I feel. The concept of that was stuck in my head for so long.”
Taking this idea and putting her lyrical diary entries to music, it all began to come together. With her ideas sketched out, she took them to her friend and producer, Josh Mehling, where they began to flesh them out properly. Bringing the classically trained, multi-instrumentalist Luna Li into the mix (“Who can play any instrument, even if she doesn’t know how to play it”), who also features on ‘Meteor’, it all took the shape of a bright new iteration of Grace Inspace.
“Working with other musicians that you admire is the best part of being an artist,” Grace explains, “because so much is you alone in your bedroom trying to turn a diary entry into something. So when I started writing this, it was with the intent that I wanted it to involve my community as much as possible.”
However, her resilience was soon to be tested. It was around the time she was nearing the deadline for her EP that the 2025 LA fires happened, which sadly rendered her Altadena house uninhabitable. But these moments are a part of the larger Grace picture of staying strong. “I’ve always had a very transient life, because my parents are artists, so we were always moving around with a bohemian poverty kind of existence,” she explains. With this territory came a yearning to feel steady, which her house was for a brief time. “But then I was bouncing around sofa to sofa again, and then I got long COVID. It was such a strange year that even though I had written the EP before it all, it was my anchor through all of that.”
“I feel like I’m good at staying optimistic through all of those peaks and pits of life, which is also something I learned from my parents,” she explains. “They were more at the helm of the Tempest, but they were also experiencing the ups and downs of our artistic itinerant existence, and they always managed to make things feel magical, even when they were stressful, even when we had no money, and we didn’t have somewhere to live. Like they always managed to make it feel like still a fairy tale, and like it was always going to get better.”
When parents skew in a particular direction as hard as Grace’s parents did, often you find the children veer as hard away. In fact, Grace did to a degree, and she’s just as surprised that she didn’t end up in something as suit and tie as corporate law. “I feel like I was very studious at school,” she laughs. “I was very disapproving of my parents and was rebelling with my straight A’s, and my dad used to bribe me to go to parties. He’d be like, ‘Oh, I’ll give you a lift. I’ll wait outside, just go’. He was like, ‘I want to be called into the headmistress’s office once!’”
This would ultimately prove futile given Grace’s current career. Especially since she was born in LA, where in her parents’ basement – a makeshift studio-cum-magazine-publisher – and as a toddler she couldn’t keep away from, the creative was always going to be a part of Grace’s life.
"My dad used to bribe me to go to parties"
As for what she wants to get out of this career of hers, it’s quite simple, really. “I feel like the more that I make music and the longer I’m existing in this life, and when I’m defining what success is, I really want to provide what has been provided to me through books and music and just any kind of art form that you can observe. I want to narrate people’s lives.” In particular, her reflections take her back to those days on the top deck of the school bus, where people can use Grace’s music to become their own main character. “It’s more of a fantasy world that I’m building.”
When you’re unable to have a physical location as home, sometimes that community you’ve amassed becomes a stand-in. That’s what Grace is looking for from her project, beyond true creative expression. “I feel like it all just comes back to community. I just want to expand it and find other people that don’t have the words to describe what they’re feeling, so they can listen to my music or read the lyrics and feel part of something,” she ponders. “I like where Grace Inspace is right now, and I just want to keep building off of that. I want people to feel seen and heard.” In a world that can feel hellishly relentless, Grace Inspace offers a safe place where embracing emotion – and your little intricacies – is wonderfully encouraged. ■
Taken from the March 2026 issue of Dork. Grace Inspace’s EP ’Heavy Hair’ is out 27th February.
