Alice Sheppard Fidler MRSS

Bio

Alice Sheppard Fidler’s practice spans Installation, sculpture and performance, often operating outside the gallery context. Born 1966, UK, she lives and works near Stroud, Gloucestershire, having lived in London till 2016, where she was a founding member of Studio Voltaire Gallery and Arts Charity.

Selected solo shows include, Imagining the fluidity of Permanence, Casa Regis, Italy 2022 and Site-specific Installation Surfeit, Old Butchers Shop, Stroud 2019. Collaborative exhibitions Alice curated and exhibited in, include THISS, eight artists bring their practice outside, Stroud, 2022 and leave / stay / arrive, an exhibition with artist Rebecca Stapleford on the former site of the Comrades Club, Nailsworth 2021. Alice exhibits in group shows with regular inclusion in the RWA Annual Open, Bristol. Commissions include support for new work from Bricks Bristol 2020 and in 2022 Alice received the Gilbert Bayes Award for 2023, from the Royal Society of Sculptors.

She is a Guest lecturer at The University of the West of England, Bristol where she received her MA in Fine Art, and is the founder of The Hide Artist Retreat which offer residencies, workshops, events and exhibitions in her studio at The Hide and on-line.

Statement

I’m interested in the fragile and imperceptible boundaries between places, human experience and states of being. I play with oppositions and contradictions, surveying the tensions between binaries such as: absence and presence; isolation and communication.
My practice is an amalgamation of sculpture, installation and performance.

In response to the excess produced in the physical world, I use found materials and spaces, transforming them through minimal adjustments and subtle gestures. I construct temporary ‘stagings’, often using modular elements to build forms that are different each time they are completed. The transience of the work is key, whether it is an object that can be packed away or a performance which cannot be repeated.

My site-specific approach regularly operates outside the gallery context, responding to available, on-hand resources that each new project offers up. I spend time in a space to understand its materials, creating work informed by the specificity of place.

I use the body, present or absent, as a tool. My work is often performative, employing movement as well as theatrical language. I’m interested in seeing the drama of a moment teased out through common place actions, mundane objects and humour.

As an antidote to sourcing and interacting, I spend time in my studio drawing. This act is the private and meditative aspect of my practice. As a remedy to being alone in my studio, I like to collaborate with other artists and community members to make work.

My practice is shaped by a recycling of ideas, actions and materials.