Alice Sheppard Fidler Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
I work with sculpture, installation, performance, and intervention to explore time, history, the deep feelings of things, and embodied human presence. Since graduating from my MA in 2020, I have situated my work both inside and beyond the gallery setting as a means to investigate the interaction between my work, space, and site. I am a member of The Royal Society of Sculptors and Spike Island.
Sheppard Fidler received the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors, the CAS Emerging Sculptor Development Award in 2023/4, and is an Associate at Spike Island, Bristol. She is a founding member of Studio Voltaire Gallery and Arts Charity and runs the artist-led initiative The Hide Artist Retreat. Before completing her MA in Fine Art at the University of the West of England in 2020, she worked in design for television, film, and fashion.
Recent exhibitions: Bow Arts ‘Take a seat’, Unit 1, 50/50, London, Gilbert Bayes Award Show, Arthouse Wakefield + London; Fluxus Museum Video Prize finalist, Paros (2024); Mother Art Prize finalist, London (2023); Imagining the fluidity of Permanence, solo show, Casa Regis, Italy (2022); two-person site-specific exhibition with artist Rebecca Stapleford, Three Storeys, Nailsworth (2021). Residencies include: Bow Arts, London (2024) PADA, Portugal (2023) Casa Regis Italy (2022). Commissions include: Bricks, Bristol (2020).
I draw on somatic approaches to develop my work, using my body to tune into spaces, the feeling of light, and the qualities of materials. This is also a process of sensing into the potential audience experience. I often work with a material repeatedly, for example utilising reclaimed velvet in works such as Crappy little things to hold in your hand (2020), Sandbags (2020), and The burden of eternal recurrence (2023), exploring different dimensions of the contrast between soft surface and hard substance, and exploring nuances of the material. My work tends to evolve and iterate as I identify strands of meaning or significant qualities of a material or process that become a seed for the next work. My approach is often performative, critically repurposing skills from my previous career in set design and using objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. This interplay between the scale of objects and spaces for human bodies preoccupies me, and shows up in various works, including Domain (2019), That which we cannot see (2023), and Opposition / Situation / Disclosure (2019). My works often involve minimal alterations or interventions to existing materials or objects, but I also construct objects and props from scratch, extending my sculptural language beyond found objects into the territory of the suggestive or speculative.
I deliberately use minimal configurations to structure an experience for the viewer, creating the possibility for a moment of pause or slowing of time, allowing their own questions and meanings to emerge. Because my work leaves space for the audience to bring their own material to the experience, it tends to generate oscillations between absurdity and poignance, pointlessness and tenderness, holding space for the flux between absence and presence that is at the heart of the present moment.
