From train stations to hospital gardens, Lucy Grainge makes art everywhere for everyone

Lucy Grainge will tell you that her final year at Glasgow School of Art was "basically one long therapy session". She had arrived there undiagnosed dyslexic, carrying years of school in which she'd been called "dilly dally day dream" rather than understood (the name of which she also turned into a book).

Art school gave her the language and the space to unpick it – she interviewed dyslexic friends, pored over statistics, made prints from spoonerisms and words she'd always mispronounced. "Showing my insecurities off in my artwork was cathartic, and a powerful connector with others." Later, she was also diagnosed with ADHD. "It's definitely a strength in my job, but it comes with many challenges which I've developed coping strategies to work through – however, burnout is real!"

Originally from Manchester, Lucy studied Communication Design at the Glasgow School of Art after an art foundation at Manchester Metropolitan University. What came after graduation was a patchwork life that turned out to be formative: four years of freelance design and illustration work, a stint as a part-time swimming teacher, facilitation work at Impact Arts in Glasgow running Craft Cafe – a regular arts group in Govan for older people that she describes simply as "the antidote to loneliness" and employability workshops for teenagers, many of them dyslexic and extremely creative, who didn't yet know it. "I shared my journey with them, and at first they didn't believe me," she says, "as they thought no one with dyslexia could get to university."

By the time Lucy moved to London in 2021, she had a clear sense of what she wanted her practice to be. That was embedded in communities, responsive to place and existing outside the gallery. She launched Wiggle Wonderland CIC – a touring pavilion, designed in collaboration with architectural designer Beau McCarthy, whose hanging artwork is created by local artists and communities wherever it lands. It has since been installed at Brainchild Festival, Tottenham Court Road, a shopping centre in Croydon, a school field in Enfield, the National Memorial Arboretum and St Bartholomew's Hospital. "I've always felt art should be accessible to everyone and embedded in the everyday," she says.

The work across all of this is vivid, defined by bold, saturated screenprints in which letters, shapes and fragmented forms tumble against each other – the visual logic of a brain that processes the world differently, made joyful and shareable. Her risograph output carries the same energy. The palette is always generous, and colour, she says, is something she works with intuitively.

Two recent commissions particularly stand out in her portfolio. For the Wellcome Collection, Lucy was given free rein across four illustrations accompanying an editorial on the misconceptions of dyslexia – a commission she describes as "a pivotal moment". The brief let her work through ideas she'd been developing privately for years, such as how to depict the tunnels she sees in large blocks of text, the effort involved in reading and the long way round her brain takes to arrive at something. "I often see letters and words more as shapes," she explains. The resulting work is warm and graphic, difficult to look away from.

The second is "I can hear cruncheey leevs", an installation for the sculpture garden at Dulwich Picture Gallery, made with local primary school children and her sister, architectural designer Zoe Grainge. Lucy led workshops in the gardens, which involved foraging, printmaking, drawing, and creative writing, and then collated the children's work onto fabric draped around a den-like structure. She embroidered their handwriting directly onto the cloth – the wooden shapes surrounding it were cut from their drawings. The title comes from one of the children, with an intentional typo to boot.

Currently on a screenprinting residency at Kypseli Print Studio in Athens, Lucy is also deep in her first two permanent public art commissions – both ceramic-tiled murals made with 200-year-old tile manufacturer Craven Dunnill Jackfield. One is a co-design project with young people in Bexhill, destined for the town's train station. The other goes to a housing development in Croydon. "I'm well aware these tiles are going to outlive me," she says, "and the community will be living with them for the rest of their lives."

"It's important to me to create artwork which is embedded in place, responsive to the people who live and work there and representative of me as an artist. As an artist working within public space, it's often a balancing act."