Alice Anderson (b. 11 November 1976 in London, England) 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 called The 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.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/alice_anderson.htm?section_name=shape_of_things2
http://www.riflemaker.org/s-alice-anderson
http://www.artopiagallery.it/html/ALICE_Imm.html