Alice Sheppard Fidler

Artist statement

Alice Sheppard Fidler works with found spaces and materials, intervention, and action, to create sculpture, installation, performance, and works on paper. Her work is sited both in and out of the gallery. She often begins by identifying a zone of rigidity (a rule, a social code, or a hard physical surface), and then working into the space around it, rubbing up against everyday conventions until their obviousness disintegrates, toying with oppositions until their hard edges loosen.

Her installations are temporary re-stagings often assembled from modular elements that travel between contexts, searching for new narratives to unfold. By transforming spaces and materials with minimal adjustments and subtle gestures, and leaning into rules and limitations, her work invites us to experience oscillations between absurdity and poignance, pointlessness and tenderness.

Her approach is often performative, critically repurposing skills from her previous career in set design and using objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. She leverages the distance between the viewer and the art object to draw attention to loss of connection or contact, and deploys found materials, with their past life of damage and care, filled with unanswered and unanswerable questions, to open us up to the unknown.

Ideas behind the work

The ideas behind this work come from happening upon farm boundary where cans on a fence were being used as an alarm to warn of intruders. The wind however, was activating the cans and producing a rhythmical sound that I found comforting and mediative. I was fascinated by the dual nature of the construction, something that could sooth yet agitate, be music but also an alarm, something made from rough, cheap materials but be a valuable thing. The boundary, something that usually keeps people out, was musical and inviting and drew me closer.

In the UK we have a long history of containing land and having ownership of it. Through this work I am questioning whether a boundary can be a place of enquiry rather than a place of limitations and restraint. I am using the convergence of two or more things coming together to form a new whole. I want to create an experience that by pulling focus on the space between these differences, an awareness can be formed, something that can bring the ‘I’ or ‘me’ into the space. The work is constantly in flux, the cans moving and sounding at any moment, and an awareness of being present can be uncomfortable, but by questioning and valuing everyday life and being and the doing in the moment, it can sometimes produce liberating thinking.