Alice Anderson at the Wellcome Collection
Franco-British artist Alice Anderson reigns into autumn with big solo shows in London and Paris. AT the Wellcome Collection (‘Memory Movement Memory Objects’, to 18 Oct) she sticks to the core of her current practice – weaving everyday items into copper thread through a ritualistic and dance-like performative process. Anderson sees this as a recording method which avoids digitalisation’s outsourcing of memory from the human to the virtual – cue the scientific links which fit the Wellcome’s programme. She and her performers have mummified all manner of objects, singly and as assemblages and installations, with the possible sub-text of burying the excesses of consumer society. There’s an autobiographical aspect, too: Anderson’s previous practice has often referred to her own striking copper hair. Meanwhile in Paris ’Data Space’ (to 20 Sept) occupies a circular run of rooms on the 5th floor of Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton. Anderson has woven round copies of its features and installed them as sculpture. Not only are they transformed by displacement and the seductive coppery sheen, but they are reshaped either by the process (the ceiling panels buckle and warp) or by the way they are configured (the floorboards are shown in circular formations, the lift cables loop intestinally). It’s as if the space is inhabited by a mis-recollection of itself. Go to Paris, too, for Anderson’s painting-like thread abstractions and her trembling piles of copper wire mesh, poised on the boundary between form and formlessness like memories yet to take shape…
Floorboards at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
