Alice Anderson
Encyclopedia
Alice Anderson Bio
Born in England from an English man and a French-Jewish mother, Anderson was 4 years old when she was told not to speak English nor to mention her father after her parents separated.
Brought up in Nice, Anderson spoke very little but she most immersed herself in painting at an early age. She left home when she was fourteen to become an au pair for a family in New York
. Her stay with the family was short-lived but she remained living in the city. It was here where she began to create Art works, which presented time and memory as what will become her significant “working materials”.
After her visa expired, she had to return to France, this time to Paris
, where she met a woman artist who was teaching at the Ecole du Louvre. For one year, Anderson attended a program of courses without being formally registered in the school.
In 1998 she was admitted into the Ecoles des Beaux Arts de Paris where she studied with Christian Boltanski
and Annette Messager
2001 was the year she moved back to London where she began to build an autobiographical work whilst completing a Master of Arts degree in Fine Art at the Goldsmiths College in 2004.
During 4 years she was mainly making films, exploring her recurrent obsession of recollection. For Anderson the act of remembering is a creative process in which memory is constantly reinventing itself. To focus on her childhood she created a doll at her effigy in 2007 and started a cycle of videos calledThe Doll's day
In 2008 she started working on the rituals that she was doing as a child. “I remember inventing rituals for myself to calm my anxieties. These rituals consisted of undoing the thread from seams and I wound these threads around parts of my body and other objects. This obsession became so bad that I started to do the same thing using my own hair. Time stops as soon as my rituals began.”
For the first time she started to make sculptures with threads and dolls’ hair which became Anderson’s main autobiographical material symbolizing time and memory.
In the course of three years she has been developed series of works mixing dolls, dolls hair, thread and plaster as well as large scale architectures directly sculpted on buildings. She stopped making films and started a series of video performances which were used as starting points to achieve her sculptures.
In April 2011, her exhibition at the Freud Museum marked a rupture with the figurative. She engaged with geometry while she was making a piece for Anna Freud’s loom. She created grids series made of dolls hair, which opened new directions for her work.
From then on she started to push the material of dolls hair to new boundaries by repeating different actions of dividing and separating the material itself. This “untraditional” material becomes like a skin surface consisting of many layers in which sculptures as Monolith took shape.
Questioning Time, and particularly the passage of Time and its ineluctability and taking cues from the post minimalist movement (heritage of Joseph Beuys
), Anderson's new sculptures, open new grounds where neurosciences and Art are confronted.
http://www.alice-anderson.org/Alice Anderson Official Website
Born in England from an English man and a French-Jewish mother, Anderson was 4 years old when she was told not to speak English nor to mention her father after her parents separated.
Brought up in Nice, Anderson spoke very little but she most immersed herself in painting at an early age. She left home when she was fourteen to become an au pair for a family in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Her stay with the family was short-lived but she remained living in the city. It was here where she began to create Art works, which presented time and memory as what will become her significant “working materials”.
After her visa expired, she had to return to France, this time to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where she met a woman artist who was teaching at the Ecole du Louvre. For one year, Anderson attended a program of courses without being formally registered in the school.
In 1998 she was admitted into the Ecoles des Beaux Arts de Paris where she studied with Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski is French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker.-Life and work:Having no formal art education, he began painting in 1958. Nevertheless, he first came to public attention in 1960 with few short films and publication of several notebooks...
and Annette Messager
Annette Messager
Annette Messager is a French artist who was born in 1943. She is known mainly for her installation work which often incorporates photographs, prints and drawings, and various materials. Messager has exhibited and published her work extensively...
2001 was the year she moved back to London where she began to build an autobiographical work whilst completing a Master of Arts degree in Fine Art at the Goldsmiths College in 2004.
During 4 years she was mainly making films, exploring her recurrent obsession of recollection. For Anderson the act of remembering is a creative process in which memory is constantly reinventing itself. To focus on her childhood she created a doll at her effigy in 2007 and started a cycle of videos calledThe Doll's day
In 2008 she started working on the rituals that she was doing as a child. “I remember inventing rituals for myself to calm my anxieties. These rituals consisted of undoing the thread from seams and I wound these threads around parts of my body and other objects. This obsession became so bad that I started to do the same thing using my own hair. Time stops as soon as my rituals began.”
For the first time she started to make sculptures with threads and dolls’ hair which became Anderson’s main autobiographical material symbolizing time and memory.
In the course of three years she has been developed series of works mixing dolls, dolls hair, thread and plaster as well as large scale architectures directly sculpted on buildings. She stopped making films and started a series of video performances which were used as starting points to achieve her sculptures.
In April 2011, her exhibition at the Freud Museum marked a rupture with the figurative. She engaged with geometry while she was making a piece for Anna Freud’s loom. She created grids series made of dolls hair, which opened new directions for her work.
From then on she started to push the material of dolls hair to new boundaries by repeating different actions of dividing and separating the material itself. This “untraditional” material becomes like a skin surface consisting of many layers in which sculptures as Monolith took shape.
Questioning Time, and particularly the passage of Time and its ineluctability and taking cues from the post minimalist movement (heritage of Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
), Anderson's new sculptures, open new grounds where neurosciences and Art are confronted.
http://www.alice-anderson.org/Alice Anderson Official Website