CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #26: Alice Sheppard Fidler

Alice 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.

"My practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and intervention, investigating time, history, materiality, and embodied presence. Since completing my MA in 2020, I have worked both within and beyond gallery settings to examine how my work interacts with space and site. Drawing on my background in set design, I use objects to stand in for bodies, exploring the relationship between form, scale, and human interaction.

Over the past year, I have been developing ideas for a new body of large-scale sculptural work that explores altered vessel-forms and their interaction with human bodies. My small-scale studies have focused on faceted, ambiguous shapes that seem to reference multiple times and histories, and I am imagining these expanded to human scale. My work is often minimal in configuration, structuring an experience for the viewer that allows for moments of pause, slowness, and personal interpretation.

I use somatic approaches in my practice, tuning into spaces, light, and material qualities to shape both my process and the experience of the audience. My work evolves iteratively, with each piece informing the next. I have previously created mobile, adaptable sculptural forms from reclaimed velvet filled with sand and gravel, engaging viewers in a tension between invitation and refusal of touch. I now want to expand on this by experimenting with larger, interactive forms."

You can find out more about Alice's work at www.curatorspace.com/artists/alicesheppardfidler.

Find out more about the CuratorSpace Artist Bursary and how to apply at bursary.curatorspace.com.

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