ALICE ANDERSON
'Sculpting Time'
Tuesday 2 March - Saturday 24 April 2010
Alice Anderson (b. 1976) will fill Riflemaker with thousands of metres of hair as part of an installation of matter, materials, film and video, dolls, blood drawings, sculptures, structures and photographs.
'Sculpting Time'
Tuesday 2 March - Saturday 24 April 2010
Alice Anderson (b. 1976) will fill Riflemaker with thousands of metres of hair as part of an installation of matter, materials, film and video, dolls, blood drawings, sculptures, structures and photographs.
Anderson considers time, or the passage of time, to be her most significant material.
Memories are commonly described as reconstructions and as a result are often distorted to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. For Anderson, memory is the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time might lead to a remembrance being closer to fiction that what actually occurred.
Anderson often uses wax dolls and puppets to reinvent her childhood through the distortion of her own memories. The exhibition at Riflemaker takes the artist's 9 minute film 'The Day I Became A Doll' (2009), in which a young girl stops eating, moving and speaking and gradually transforms herself into a doll in order to please her mother. During the film we witness the mother’s futile attempts to communicate while the girl gradually turns into a marionette. The film explores the theme of maternal rejection and is described as autobiographical by Anderson, who also believes that autobiography itself can often be purely fiction.
In 2006, Anderson commissioned Madame Tussauds to make a 50cm model of herself. The completion of this doll marked the beginning of an ongoing series of works including the photographic series, Master Puppet, featuring Anderson and her alter-self in the film, The Dolls' Day (2008) which takes its name from a 1915 children’s novel by Carine Cadby; it continues with 'The Day I Became a Doll' adding sculptural elements within Anderson’s installation, 'Sculpting Time', at Riflemaker.
Alice Anderson was bought up in France. Aged three, her French-speaking Algerian mother and her English father separated, her mother and Alice leaving England, the child forbidden from mentioning the country or her father again. It was then that Anderson began storytelling and making paintings about her family. She later studied fine art at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and then at Goldsmiths in London from 2004. Anderson has said that she moved to London predominantly because of her mother’s ban on speaking about London or England while she was growing up.
Alice Anderson's work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Pompidou Centre, The Grand Palais, Leon Museum and Mudam Museum. Recently she installed 3,000 metres of red hair through rooms at three different venues - the Picasso Museum in Paris, the Frac Paca and at the Marc Chagall National Museum – to form one gigantic installation called 'Rapunzel'. At Riflemaker, the hair will leave the building through a window above the gallery's entrance, re-enter through a window on the first floor and then be threaded down a chimney to create a circular loop running between the two main floors.
A catalogue to accompany the exhibition will include an essay by Marina Warner.
For further press information or images please contact: Jeanette Ward -
Theresa Simon & Partners - 020 7734 4800 - 07729 930 812 - jeanette@theresasimon.com
Memories are commonly described as reconstructions and as a result are often distorted to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. For Anderson, memory is the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time might lead to a remembrance being closer to fiction that what actually occurred.
Anderson often uses wax dolls and puppets to reinvent her childhood through the distortion of her own memories. The exhibition at Riflemaker takes the artist's 9 minute film 'The Day I Became A Doll' (2009), in which a young girl stops eating, moving and speaking and gradually transforms herself into a doll in order to please her mother. During the film we witness the mother’s futile attempts to communicate while the girl gradually turns into a marionette. The film explores the theme of maternal rejection and is described as autobiographical by Anderson, who also believes that autobiography itself can often be purely fiction.
In 2006, Anderson commissioned Madame Tussauds to make a 50cm model of herself. The completion of this doll marked the beginning of an ongoing series of works including the photographic series, Master Puppet, featuring Anderson and her alter-self in the film, The Dolls' Day (2008) which takes its name from a 1915 children’s novel by Carine Cadby; it continues with 'The Day I Became a Doll' adding sculptural elements within Anderson’s installation, 'Sculpting Time', at Riflemaker.
Alice Anderson was bought up in France. Aged three, her French-speaking Algerian mother and her English father separated, her mother and Alice leaving England, the child forbidden from mentioning the country or her father again. It was then that Anderson began storytelling and making paintings about her family. She later studied fine art at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and then at Goldsmiths in London from 2004. Anderson has said that she moved to London predominantly because of her mother’s ban on speaking about London or England while she was growing up.
Alice Anderson's work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Pompidou Centre, The Grand Palais, Leon Museum and Mudam Museum. Recently she installed 3,000 metres of red hair through rooms at three different venues - the Picasso Museum in Paris, the Frac Paca and at the Marc Chagall National Museum – to form one gigantic installation called 'Rapunzel'. At Riflemaker, the hair will leave the building through a window above the gallery's entrance, re-enter through a window on the first floor and then be threaded down a chimney to create a circular loop running between the two main floors.
A catalogue to accompany the exhibition will include an essay by Marina Warner.
For further press information or images please contact: Jeanette Ward -
Theresa Simon & Partners - 020 7734 4800 - 07729 930 812 - jeanette@theresasimon.com