Tending

Alice Clough is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and lecturer with a background in archaeology, anthropology and spiritual ecology.

Alice produces sensory objects and installations using organic materials. She uses neutral and natural colours, rhythm and repetition to create code-like compositions. She is interested in the translation of lived experience across different media, focusing on the creation and/or loss of vitality or life-force during processes of translation. Her interests can be broadly grouped into:

- the body, the senses, communication
- place, ecology, belonging
- notation, code, linguistics

Alice seeks the cross-overs and the spaces in-between. She welcomes commissions and collaboration across practices and disciplines.

This is one of a set of pieces exploring fragility, tenderness and self-care. These pieces are built and burnished by hand. On Beltane, traditionally a time of growth, fertility and new beginnings, the artist cut her long hair. This is something many of us take for granted, but in cultures around the world hair cutting is a highly symbolic act, only done to mark a birth, a death, or a major rite of passage. Hair is understood to contain our consciousness, our spirit. Here, the artist has embedded her hair in unfired porcelain which remains soft and fragile. The burnished porcelain body is, like the human body, easily marked and bruised. Both body and bowl form a gesture of holding, containing, and offering

Unfired Porcelain with the Artist's Hair

15x7.5cm