CoExist Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
CoExist are proud to host Alice Anderson’s new solo exhibition, Years After Years, in which the artist presents a new body of work made especially for the gallery.
Following her recent exhibition, Alice Anderson’s Childhood Rituals at the Freud Museum, Anderson has marked a rupture with the figurative and engaged with geometry, which opens new directions in her work.
In this exhibition, Anderson gives shape to an auto-biographical timescale, counting days, recalling body changes and organising a series of protective elements.
365 DAYS is a sculpture consisting of 365 vertical bars of copper and dolls hair. Stretching from floor to ceiling, the bars divide the whole of the gallery’s space, whilst still allowing the visitor to navigate the area inside. Each bar marks a day of the year Anderson spent in Algeria at the age of eleven. The series of bars suggest a calendar and show a given time and space becoming a ritual space by reactivating physical and psychological states.
TOISE is a sculpture made of 11 rectangles of dolls hair fixed to the wall like the rungs of a ladder. Every rectangle corresponds to a year of Anderson’s life, and recalls how her grandparents used to measure her physical growth, marking the wall year after year.
Questioning time, and particularly the passage of time and its ineluctability, Anderson’s dolls hair retains her memories and refers to the rituals completed with her own hair and threads during her childhood.
In this exhibition Anderson has pushed the material of dolls hair to new boundaries with the series of works SKIN SCULPTURES by repeating an action of dividing and separating the material itself. This “untraditional” material forms a skin-like surface consisting of many layers. In the Winch Room, these sculptures will envelop the space like skin protects a body.
A book of the exhibition will be available.
CoExist Gallery C/o TAP (The Old Waterworks) North Road Southend-on-Sea Essex SS0 7AB
www.coexist.org.uk
