Alice Anderson

In 2020, Alice Anderson has been nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp.

Marie Maertens, Sacred Gestures in Data Words, La Patinoire Royale, Brussels, 2020

Anderson's practice has to be read in the context of the digital evolution. “It is more likely that human degeneration won’t be the cause of the robots but of our submission and our muscular and neuronal passivity” writes the paleoanthropologist and teacher at the College de France Pascal Picq. [3] . Moving, walking and thinking will save humanity. This intuition is at the heart of Anderson's practice and in her new sculptures series ‘Bodily Itineraries’ presented at the Patinoire Royale Brussels. [4]

Anderson's work explores alternative ways of memorising objects and places in 3D in the age of digital technology. The digital world gives us information, freedom, creativity, and at the same time it fundamentally changes the process of our memorisation. Permanently immersed in millions of informations that machines 'memorize for us’, Anderson responds to the idea that our memories live exclusively ‘online’ and questions the ‘how’ and ‘what’ to remember.

At the end of 2019, the Atelier Calder has been a major step in Anderson’s practice where she started painting again as she used to do it in her youth. During her residency, a new artistic period has emerged through the use of new colours. She created huge paintings in which the architecture imagined by Alexander Calder came to life through an intimate and daily ritual of spontaneous dance-performances.

Anderson's works make prevalent use of copper wire, a signature material which originated from the artist being drawn to copper wire's ‘shiny, hypnotic’ properties which triggered the thought that copper represents the connectivity of a digital world and provide a means of ‘memorising’ objects. Anderson's first large-scale project using copper thread was to bind the façade of the Freud Museum with 3000 metres of thread in ‘Housebound’ (2011), which replicated the entire length of digital cables found within the site. Abstracting the innards of architecture to its digital nervous system, Anderson proceeded to apply this action to foundational structures within architecture: replicating, deconstructing and appropriating transitional structures such as stairs, windows and lifts housed within the host building. Through the process of ‘memorising’ the structures with copper wire, the elements are printed, contorted and displaced, often to points beyond immediate recognition. This body of works within Anderson's practice is termed ‘Architectures Data’.

Anderson was drawn to extend the application of copper thread from large-scale architectures to objects. In the artist's words, "I always worry to break or lose an object, therefore I have established rules: when one of the objects around me is likely to become obsolete or is lost in stream of our lives, I ‘memorise’ it with thread before it happens." Anderson has ’memorised’ all manner of objects from the complete ‘weaving’ of objects in her studio to a car, remembering the physicality of an object through the exploration of its materiality and physical extremities. The process of winding wire around objects takes Anderson into a meditative and rhythmic space of repetition, with movements akin to dance. Anderson connects with the objects in two ways: first, as substitutes for human interaction as she says that in her childhood she had "a very hard time connecting with people, and most of the time, my emotions weren't tied up with the person I had in front me, but rather with the objects associated with the moment of my relation with them"; secondly, this process is a way of recording and charging objects by printing them with the signature of her movement. It is, in that sense, practical rather than nostalgic. This body of work is termed ‘Memorised Objects’.

"I give rise to several different series of performative drawings. Most of them are resulting from a repetitive gesture. In the series ‘Objects Portraits’, I experiment the vibrational properties of their representation. I draw the virtual rhythms’ barcodes of objects's to translate their presence. I construct a language to hear them, to touch them, to dance with them." John Cage is not far from this when he talked to what led him to the percussion: “When I was introduced to Oscar Fischinger, he began telling me about the spirit to be found in every object in the world. The object has to be touched in order to release its spirit and to liberate its sound.” This ensemble of empty and full spaces is my connection to them. [6]

Without particular rules or methods, participants are enabled to contribute to a collective sculpture. Utilising copper-coloured wire, each participant must formulate their own gestures around their object, they also must realise individual understandings of those actions. Small objects generate an intense concentration, resulting in faster motions. Whilst larger objects demand slower movements and collaboration with others. In both cases, the performative objects are ‘magically charged’. They carry the collective energy and the identity of each participant. Objects produced collectively are authored by the 'invited performers' with their names and details.

Annabelle Gugnon, La Patinoire Royale, Brussels, 2018 [7]

GLASS MAGAZINE, Allie Nawrat, 2017 [11] UNIT 9 [12]

THE TRANSFORMATIVE OBJECT AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, 2017 [13]

The Culture Trip, Ten British Female Artists You Should Know, Anne Rybka, 2017 10 British Female Artists You Should Know

Alice Anderson: Post-Digital, Paul Carey Kent, 2016 [14]

In 2015 she exhibited her objects '[5]' in copper wire at the Wellcome Collection in London. Jonathan Jones of The Guardian described the work as "glutinous in the memory. The reason it works is because she takes the whole thing so stupendously seriously. This is passionate, obsessive, intensely concentrated work." Visitors were asked to help the artist record a Ford Mustang in wire through a collective sculpture. Anderson also uses rough material such as recycled steel and works with metallic meshes to create sculptures from repetitive gestures

Recording The Present, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton Paris by J. de Gonet, 2015 [16]

The Art of Memory, Wellcome Collection by Kate Forde, 2015 [18]

The Science of Perception, by Israel Rosenfield, 2015 [19]

ARTPRESS, Alice Anderson by Annabelle Gugnon, October 2015 [21]

In 2013, Alice Anderson's sculptures were featured at the 55th Venice Biennale. In 2013/2014, Anderson's work was shown at London's Freud Museum in a group exhibition Parallels have also been drawn between Anderson and the Post Minimalism movement. In 2015 Anderson participated in solo exhibitions at Wellcome Collection London and Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2016 Anderson installed a series of permanent sculptures at the Eiffel Historical Building in Paris, as well as a series of large-scale sculptures in a group show at the Saatchi Gallery, in London. In 2017, Anderson exhibited in a solo exhibition at UNIT9, London and began a series of performances at Centre Pompidou, who acquired her performance-generated sculpture, 'Floorboards data', for their permanent collection in 2018.

In September 2012, Anderson founded Alice Anderson's Travelling Studio after a debut performance at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Set-up as a performance lab, the Travelling Studio is defined as an ‘itinerant space' containing a studio, an archive with its ongoing collection (sometimes done with guest performers or public), a physical archive, an exhibition space inviting curators, historians, scientists to establish connections between people, worlds and communities that questions objects witnessing our time. If it evokes Andy Warhol's factory, for Anderson it has to be understood as a place producing solidarity bound to objects. These objects are therefore intended to become contemporary ‘archeologies’. Addressing multiple aspects of our societies, the ritual objects have no aesthetic value, only that of the performance.

Anderson's practice began primarily with video. In 2011, this took a new direction following her personal exhibition at the Freud Museum in London, where she worked on Anna Freud's loom and initiated geometrical works of lines and grids. This is also when Anderson began to use copper-coloured wire in her studio. ‘I repaired objects and put them back together again, and during one of these dismantling sessions I came across an alarm clock with a bobbin of copper wire inside it’.

Alice Anderson (born 1972) is a French-British artist who studied Fine Art at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Goldsmiths College, London. She currently lives and works in London. Anderson works primarily with copper-coloured wire, colour paint, oil pastel, corten steel, and is associated with the Postdigital movement: as a way of finding spirituality through the developing technologies. James Bridle: