ZERO GRADIENT ART
What's a Zero Gradient anyway???
Currently based out of Teesside, North East England - Zero is a contemporary artist with a passion for exploring and experimenting with art and its materials. Best known for his Graffiti/Street Art imagery, Zero's career has seen him grow from the streets of the UK to the walls of galleries and homes across the World.
Zero Gradient is the name Stephen developed while studying for his MA in Fine Art at the University of Teesside, graduating in 2016. During this period, his practice began expanding beyond painting and installation into sound and video work, and he was encouraged to create a name to perform under.
Before this, Stephen had worked either under his own name or through a series of aliases connected to his street art and graffiti background. None of them felt connected to the work he was beginning to create. Zero Gradient emerged as a name that reflected both the droned industrial sound pieces he was producing at the time and his own mindset as an artist.
Before returning to university, Stephen felt creatively lost. His work had stalled, and much of the passion and direction that had driven him since childhood had faded. Undertaking the MA became a way of confronting that feeling – to either rediscover the need to create or accept that it might be time to walk away from it altogether.
Instead, the experience reignited something.
Alongside a renewed confidence came a deeper understanding of his practice and a desire to push the work further. New opportunities began to appear, audiences started connecting with the work in unexpected ways, and the creative momentum that had once felt absent slowly returned.
Over time, Stephen chose to bring all areas of his practice together under the name Zero Gradient, or Zero Gradient Art. What began as an identity for performance work evolved into the name that now connects every aspect of his practice – from street art and painting to installation, sculpture, sound, and video work.
Today, the name remains a reminder of a period of personal and creative change: the point where the work, and the belief in it, began moving forward again.
``My work exploits practice and form to create work that is not predetermined by its outcome, but rather through the process in which it is created. Destruction, abstraction and re-imagining drives this process and, as a result, the finished work can be seen more as a product of its production then the piece itself. I don't believe that I create the work, rather that I assist with its own creation. A sound, a shape, a colour or a brush stroke - whether intentional or not - can dramatically alter the direction in which my work develops. It is this uncertainty, this chance encounter, that drives me and the work which I facilitate. Through this I aim to find the beauty within the discarded, draw attention to the unnoticed, and find creation though the destructed. I do not see any of my work as being pieces, but rather site specific installations, with every piece not truly being complete until it is in place, and it is from there - with the interaction it makes within its environment - that it becomes complete.``
Zero Gradient
Self Portrait of artist Zero Gradient - 2026