INTRODUCTION

Alice Sheppard Fidler works with found spaces and materials, intervention, and action, to create sculpture, installation, performance, and works on paper. Her work is sited both in and out of the gallery. She often begins by identifying a zone of rigidity (a rule, a social code, or a hard physical surface), and then working into the space around it, rubbing up against everyday conventions until their obviousness disintegrates, toying with oppositions until their hard edges loosen.

Her installations are temporary re-stagings often assembled from modular elements that travel between contexts, searching for new narratives to unfold. By transforming spaces and materials with minimal adjustments and subtle gestures, and leaning into rules and limitations, her work invites us to experience oscillations between absurdity and poignance, pointlessness and tenderness. Her approach is often performative, critically repurposing skills from her previous career in set design and using objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. She leverages the distance between the viewer and the art object to draw attention to loss of connection or contact, and deploys found materials, with their past life of damage and care, filled with unanswered and unanswerable questions, to open us up to the unknown.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Alice Sheppard Fidler is a founding member of Studio Voltaire Gallery and Arts Charity and runs the artist-led initiative The Hide Artist Retreat. Before completing her MA in Fine Art at the University of the West of England in 2020 she worked in design for television, film, and fashion.

After her degree in textiles, 1989, Alice set up a design studio producing fabric designs for national and international clients such as Timney and Fowler and Laura Ashley. From there, she went on to design interiors with a special focus on painted finishes and murals. She designed for a range of high-end private clients and commercial spaces such as banks, night clubs, hospitals, and design businesses in the UK and abroad. In this period Alice was a founder member of the arts studios and gallery Studio Voltaire and had an active studio practice in design.

During one of her mural commissions, Alice was then head hunted to assist a client's designer in their TV and Film production company. This led to Alice freelancing with the lead role of art director in the art department for Clive Howard. They worked together on many TV commercials, including Audi and Lloyds Bank often directed by the renowned Douglas Brothers.

While developing her skills under Clive, Alice built her own network of clients and freelanced for several years for Nickelodeon designing sets for Children’s TV. She also designed sets for commercials, pop promos and short films.

After the financial crash in 2008, Alice pivoted her career away from moving image to working with photographers designing sets for fashion magazines. She worked regularly with musician Bryan Adams, a successful photographer, producing sets for A -list celebrities in Tatler and Harpers Bazaar. At this time Alice was championed by a fashion stylist who linked her up with Mary Howard, US based designer for photographer Annie Leibovitz. Through this, Alice became Leibovitz UK based art department and set designer working with her for M&S campaigns and editorial shoots for Vogue with Leibovitz famed celebrity subject matter.

In 2015 Alice and family moved from London to settle in the Cotswolds. It was here she was headhunted again, this time to work for Giffords Circus. She designed and directed photos shoots for their programmes for five years as well as coordinating external photo shoots with visiting photographers.

Having had a drawing practice to serve her varied commercial careers, and after many years using her creativity for other people’s projects, Alice decided to return to ‘art school’ in 2018 to focus on developing her own critical voice. She developed a practice in which she transforms the tools of commercial visual production into tools for critical exploration.

She concluded her Fine Art MA at the University of the West of England in 2020 with distinction despite the pandemic and is currently establishing a successful career as a fine artist producing sculpture, installation and works on paper.

She is currently a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors and the CAS Emerging Sculptor Development Award, and is a Spike Island Associate.

Recent projects and exhibitions include: RWA Open, Bristol, 2023, Mother Art Prize finalist, London, 2023, Imagining the fluidity of Permanence, solo show, Casa Regis, Italy 2022, two-person site-specific exhibition leave / stay / arrive with artist Rebecca Stapleford, Three Storeys, Nailsworth 2021. 

She attended residencies at PADA Studios Portugal in 2023 and at Casa Regis Italy, 2022, and received a commission from Bricks, Bristol in 2020 to develop new work.