12/07/26
Somehow five months of my year-long Freelands Foundation Fellowship at Brighton School of Art have passed already. It’s scary how quickly the time has gone, but when I think back to February when I arrived in Brighton from Edinburgh, I can see how much has changed in my life, both creatively and personally. I feel incredibly lucky to have the time, space and funding to get to make every day, solely with the aim of developing my practice.
The fellowship takes place in seven universities across the UK, and if you’ve studied at one, you can apply to another. This means that there are seven of us fellows, who have uprooted ourselves and moved to another city for a year. When I think about it, I’m not sure this experience would have felt quite so significant and profound without this complete shake-up of my life.
In a lot of ways, I found the move very hard; there were some inevitable teething issues and I felt so homesick. But now that I feel more settled and happy (I’ve moved into a great house! I have really nice friends!), I can see how much I’ve grown in confidence, and how those initial challenges have actually had a positive impact on my work.
I feel like I’ve had a reset and I’m building my creative life back up again, piece by piece, but that I’m not returning to the way I used to work before. I can feel a shift taking place in my practice and I’m considering all sorts of things – what I’m making, the materials I’m using, why I make the things I make, how I’d like to develop, and where I see myself at the end of this fellowship.
Although painting will always be my one true love, I’m not sure that I would consider myself solely a painter anymore. That’s been the most interesting change so far. I feel increasingly drawn to ceramics and sculpture, and the expanded field of painting. With the help of my lovely mentor Amy, I am working through and enjoying exploring these ideas.
So, it feels like the right time to start a monthly blog, for the remainder of my time as Freelands Fellow, as a way of documenting this exciting journey.
As this is my first blog post, I thought I would share a little about the ideas behind my practice before talking about what I've been making recently.
When I’m making paintings, I’m often thinking about the idea of world building. I’m very influenced by the idea of magical realism, and I like to make narrative style paintings that depict surreal, otherworldly and often quite playful imagery. I enjoy creating imagined scenes that blur the boundary between fantasy and reality. When people look at my work, I really want them to feel like there’s a story unfolding in front of them. I’m very drawn to painting the figure and I often use the characters in my work as a tool to tell these stories. I find that drawing from memories or stories is a really great way to activate my imagination and build my own imagined scenes.
I tend to use my own experiences of places I’ve visited, the people I know, as well as the sketches and patterns I take from the world around me as inspiration. But sometimes more established narratives like folktales, mythology and medieval manuscripts also inform my work in terms of both content and form.
PAINTING
Over the past month, I’ve been thinking about how to push my painting practice further. I’ve been working on smaller studies that focus on technique, colour, mark making and pattern with the aim of trying to develop a richer painting language and loosen up a bit. I’ve also begun revisiting a work I did previously but this time in a more expressive voice, which I’ve found very freeing.
Alongside making these studies, I've been looking at the work of other painters who are inspiring me to think differently about my own practice. I loved seeing Hurvin Anderson's retrospective at Tate Britain and was particularly drawn to the way his paintings move between abstraction and representation – something I have been exploring in my own work recently.
I've also been enjoying looking at the paintings of Ole Goldt, who is a recent discovery for me! His work is super complex, and I’m fascinated by the way he manages to create abstraction through pattern.
Hurvin Anderson
Ole Glodt
I’ve started testing ideas out in the studio, allowing for ideas to evolve in a much more open-ended way than I have done previously. For instance, in this painting I'm working on below, what started as a patterned rug in the background soon began to resemble a landscape. The patterns started to look like tree like forms, and I realised that the the rug could act as both an object and a landscape in its own right.
I love to be playful like this in my work, and I’m enjoying leaning into ambiguity. It’s these unexpected outcomes in my creative process that keep me motivated and excited to make.
When chatting with my mentor Amy, I mentioned that I don’t like my work to be about just one thing, and that I prefer to have a range of influences and narratives informing my work. When she asked me why this was the case, I realised I didn’t really have an answer.
Since then, I’ve been thinking and reading around this subject and I’ve found Philip Guston’s book 'I Paint What I Want to See' to be very informative. This paragraph in particular really struck a chord with me.
It helped me to articulate how I feel. I totally understand what Guston means when he writes ‘Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions’.
I like paintings that are a little ambiguous and feel difficult to interpret or understand initially. These are the ones that I find myself intrigued by, returning to time and time again; discovering something new each time I look.
I want the paintings I make to feel open rather than illustrating one fixed narrative. Life is full of contradictions, and it rarely feels straightforward. I want the paintings I make (and art in general) to reflect that complexity.
CERAMICS
As someone who has always focused on painting, only concentrating on one painting at a time, I’ve been pushing myself to work on several pieces at once, using different media, and this has been a major (and very welcome) change for me. I’m actually really enjoying this way of working and I’m finding that it is leading to all sorts of interesting and unexpected outcomes. I have just completed a 12-week block of ceramics classes. It’s been fun to learn new skills, and allow for mistakes, without feeling the pressure of having a specific outcome. Here are some of my creations below.
I am so excited to keep making, and see what happens. I want to go bigger, and make work which is perhaps more sculptural. Here are some of the ceramic and sculpture artists I’ve been drawing inspiration from recently. Lots of food for thought for future making :)
Richard Slee
Katy Stubbs
Charlie Duck
Joel Tomlin
DRAWING PROJECT
And last (but not least!) I have begun an exciting new drawing project inspired by a painting I made at the beginning of this year - The Arraiolos Stitch.
I’ve been interested in ancient ways of storytelling through art for quite some time. I made a body of work which was heavily inspired by medieval manuscripts, which acted as a way of spreading stories and knowledge before the invention of the printing press.
Embroidery and rug making have historically done the same thing. My idea is to create a series of drawings or illustrations which are inspired by the folklore of Sussex. The drawings will all feature hands (like you can see here) weaving the folktales. I’m looking forward to venturing out into the Sussex countryside, exploring and learning about my surroundings through folklore.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading!
Looking forward to sharing more updates next month.
Alice x
