Alice Whittaker is an artist specialising in sculpture/installation. Alice is currently based in Penryn, Cornwall, UK where she has just been awarded a First for her Fine Art BA(Hons) Degree at University College Falmouth.
Artist’s Statement:
‘I am attracted by the familiar, the domestic- walls, doors, tables, chairs- whatever has a past, a secret life which resonates with me, trapped for the moment in plaster or wood, paint or varnish. Battered, bruised flotsam, these things suggest something of the human condition with their scars, their broken shapes. More than this, they suggest so many different potentials, so many secrets. I am inspired to dig beneath their surfaces, to strip them bare, to unleash something from them, to expose what lies concealed.
I reveal the hidden nature of the object. In the initial stages of the process a kind of love or affinity with the item is stirred. I become the nurturer, seeking to mend and heal its scars. But there is a double edge to the act of healing: the thing healed is also restricted, just as a broken limb is set in a cast. There is a play on the idea of ‘fixing’: something fixed is both mended and disabled.
Just as a human under duress reveals surprising facets to his character, so the object under the tender prying of my healing pins and swathing threads also reveals hidden potential. It could have shown many possibilities but I have caught it and fixed it in just one. The object could be exulting in its newly revealed form or it could be straining against the ties that bind it. Either interpretation will be the result of the spectator being surprised into seeing a familiar object in a different way.
Sometimes a found object is interesting not because it is wounded but because its hidden nature is being withheld. In such a case I have to perpetrate an act of violence, to force it to give up its hidden potential. I delight in teasing the viewer into seeing my work as beautiful, often concealing the injury that the sculpture has undergone. Implicit in the act of healing is pain.
This is the secret ingredient that lies behind all my work, which both nurtures and hurts. It is this dichotomy that creates the tension in each piece.’