Bamboo Training 30.08.24 - 18.09.24 // Kyoto, Japan

I found out about Aki online and his business www.nagaokameichiku.com when researching structural and decorative use of bamboo and stumbled upon art of Japanese fence making. On writing to him he mentioned an interest in floral installation and our connection and exchange was established. 

After several google translate email exchanges, I set up training with him at his studio in Kameoka to west of Kyoto in Japan, receiving funding from:

- Royal Horticultural Society (travel bursary)

- The Japanese Garden Society

- DAIWA Foundation (for our exchange)

In Japan, my two weeks spent with his studio, looked like this:

Week one we worked on a floral bamboo installation alongside Lake Biwa, in creation of a giant 3.2m ball installation together which I added some flowers onto. I did not design this, but created the flowers to suit.

Week two I then spent learning how to cut and prepare bamboo, making sample bamboo fences alongside a smaller bamboo basket and ball.

Our friendship and ability to work together cemented we are seeking further installation opportunities together to continue learning from each other and spread the joy of sustainable design and combined worlds of bamboo and floral craftsmanship. Please watch this space!

Also as my reports submitted to sponsors unfurl, I look forward to sharing more information regarding this life affirming trip. Meanwhile, I leave you with a taste of the work via these series of videos _ including the foundation of all of Japanese fence work, how to tie a man’s knot. (A double man’s knot being another loop added to this, atop the original man’s knot loop.)

Five by Five 10.01.24 - 10.03.24 // Incubator, Chiltern St

Five by Five  group exhibition at Incubator features a selection of five established and five emerging artist partnerships. I am delighted to have been selected by Georgie Hopton.

Five by Five

Tamara Al-Mashouk, Jelly Green, Maggi Hambling, Rebecca Hancock, Mona Hatoum, Georgie Hopton, Abigail Lane, Ingrid Pollard & Matthew Arthur Williams

Left to RIght: Jelly Green - Alice McCabe - Georgie Hopton

Flipside Garden _ Summer / Winter at Incubator

Swimming A Long Way Together 13.10.23 // Sea Lanes Swimming Pool, Brighton

Swimming a long way together is a durational project led by visual artist and long distance swimmer Vanessa Daws curated by Rosie Hermon. It is inspired by pioneer swimmer Mercedes Gleitz.

Amy Cutler and I participated in a 47hr swimathon organised at Sea Lanes Brighton with Fabrica inspired by Mercedes Gleitz’s epic solo record breaking swim of same length in Worthing 90yrs earlier. We provided entertainment for the swimmers doing laps in loops over the same number of hours.

We were delighted to create a live performance and ambient projection of an under / over water dance of strokes and bubbles in ongoing spirals using flowers, light and sound to hint at the movements of the swimmers.

Meshworks with Amy Cutler 30.09.23 // Deptford X at Creekside Discovery Centre

Beautiful time with Dr. Amy Cutler, live floristing, sound making and projecting through creek water and ready-made votive display found on top shelf at Creekside Discovery Centre in Deptford (re-displaying their finds from the creek.)

The moon pulled apart the clouds to hover over the floral mesh cinema screen, whilst broken creek Gods ranging from Shivas to Ronald Macdonald were dressed in fragrant herbs, bright dried flowers and those historically found along embankments.

Our portable experimental cinema was designed as part of a performative after dark event, with torchlight, live projecting ecologies back at the site of origin. We experimented with forms of floral arrangement using creek plants and natural and man-made detritus projected through water gathered on site. We created an altar to findings in the creek and explored these items in relationship to rubbish, e.g supermarket trolley eco-systems, which provide vital structure often for mudbanks and smaller shaols of fish.

A bankside floral hanging is loosely inspired by the embanking of the creek over the last centuries and was made from plants connecting to the area, including hops (which would have been transported in abundance from Kent to breweries) willow, buddleja and Michaelmas daisy (which is celebrated day prior to our performance with feast of Archangel Michael and all the Angels.) These flowers were all sourced locally to Deptford and foraged with permission. Bespoke projection surface within the hanging is inspired by plankton mesh and specimen inspection nets.

TURPS BANANA _ One year of studio painting

Where is the vase, I?

Acrylic and gesso on canvas

122 x 184cm

2023

Been a total treat returning to art school - Alternative Art School, Turps Banana as part of their studio programme from 2022 - 2023.

Led by Phil Allen and orchestrated by Marcus Harvey and Helen Hayward, it has been an absolute pleasure to join the Turps Painting community. Turps provides artists with studio space and regular tutorials, artists talks and contextualising crits, with an invitation to investigate your painting practice via these sessions with mentors as much as with peers on course.

For more of my art works please visit: www.alicemccabe.com

The Unknown Home’s the Known

Acrylic and gesso on canvas

91 x 122cm

2023

Mat(t)er

Acrylic, gesso and hand cut milk bottle tops on canvas

100 x 120cm

2023

Dystopia Wetlands 21.08.23 // Realisation of accessories for Livia Rita at Southbank Centre

It was a delight as ever creating flower boots for Livia Rita’s creatures at Southbank Centre for her new performance Dystopian Wetlands.

In her own words:

DYSTOPIA WETLANDS is a new interdisciplinary performance by Livia Rita & the Avantgardeners based on the ethereal bio punk EP with the same name. The EP will be released in May 2023 alongside a cli-fi music video trilogy. DYSTOPIA WETLANDS explores cross-species alliances; interweaving our identities with nature and creating a future-focused complicity where nature can rebel.

Livia Rita has been tirelessly cultivating a reputation for subverting music through their tantalising and transformative live performances, merging musicianship and brave choreography with self-sculpted wearables (ArtFashion). This collaborative approach serves to explore the oscillating relationship of gender and nature as we strive for inclusion. During the DYSTOPIA WETLANDS live performance, the audience is invited to immerse themselves within a multisensory fantasy landscape, which provokes collective healing and intimate dreaming together with the natural world. The live band transforms into mossy creatures and lets their musical instruments be more and more taken over by samples and algorithms of natural environments, whilst the dancers metamorphosize into radical creatures, uniting the earthy with their imagination and inviting you on a quest to manifest and test possibilities of ambitious future cross-species identities.

For more of her work, please visit: Livia Rita

Adventitious Routes and Rhizomes a collaboration with Amy Ash 13.03.23 - 20.08.23 // Plas Bodfa and Window135 Gallery

Amy Ash (CA) and Alice McCabe (UK / AUS) have been collaborating on creative projects since 2017. Their collaborative work, under the moniker of Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes, looks to the characteristics, language, mythology and historical contexts of plants for guidance. With plants as their mentors, Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes translate plant wisdom through varied methodologies as a means to both disrupt systems and discuss difficult topics that resonate into the realm of human communities. Previous projects have focused on immigration, queer ecologies, and disrupting colonial histories.

Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes last worked together in 2019 through the Cultivar Residency, where they were hosted by @museumoftheflatearth on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, off the Atlantic Coast of Canada. The Museum of the Flat Earth is an offshoot of the absurdist conceptual platform, the Canadian Flat Earth Society, which was founded by Leo Ferrari, Alden Nowlan and Ray Fraser in the 70s. The Museum of the Flat Earth in Fogo Island, is run by Kay Burns who uses Flat Earth Theory as a playful curatorial platform and means of promoting critical thought, investigation and research in (and via) art.

During the Cultivar residency Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes created a series of works intended to open discussions on human travel, borders and boundaries. These range from interventions on local touristic signage, to performance and playful pedagogies. In each case, the work centres and translates plant community wisdom and ways of being in the hopes of generating new understandings of how we, as humans, organize ourselves and relate to one another.

Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes are delighted to continue the collaboration during a residency hosted by Plas Bodfa in Wales. Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes, is grateful for the dedicated time and space to pursue their work on another rural island, a site of in-betweenness that punctuates the Atlantic between the two artists’ respective homes. While rich in unique history, culture and character, these in-between land masses are also links in the chain of European-North American migration. For Alice McCabe and Amy Ash, two white artists, these locales are also important reminders of their respective positionality within the system of colonization, and present valuable sites for learning, reflection and action.

Plas Bodfa is a 100-year-old manor home transformed into a gallery, art space, and community activator that creates unique, inclusive, creative projects with roots on the Isle of Anglesey and branches throughout Wales and the world. Plas Bodfa aims to bring together people of different ages, knowledge bases, interests and backgrounds to share with each other, learn from each other’s experiences and create something new collectively.

Adventitious Routes & Rhizomes look forward to presenting both new and re-fathomed works at window 135, which is an active vitrine gallery and performance space in New Cross Gate, London, UK. Since opening in 2004, window 135 have developed a mandate of showing a new exhibition every week, highlighting exciting new works and practices.

Trace Exhibition 19.05 - 04.06.23 // OmVed Gardens

Metafleur (sustainable large-scale flowers company led by Alice) is thrilled to be part of Trace; an exhibition and events programme curated for The Chelsea Fringe in collaboration with specialist craft gallery Thrown Contemporary and OmVed Gardens.

For this fourth collaboration Metafleur will be working exclusively with materials found onsite to bind the exhibition contents and Omved gardens further in exhibition Trace. This curated exhibition of 12 distinctive collections aims to explore the marks we make, physical imprints and expressive gestures alongside thoughts about heritage, influence and our ecological footprint.

As part of the exhibition there was a workshop with Alice looking and tracing garden and exhibition content via small floral interventions using only three natural pieces of material found onsite.

Recreational Grounds VII 05.05 - 07.05 // Curated by Catherine Long, Jesus Crespo and Dido Hallett

Recreational Grounds was founded by Tim Ralston and Fiona Grady and joined by Anna Lytridou in 2019.

Recreational grounds is a reaction to the issues of limits and accessibility of the more typical exhibition spaces in London, with an aim to encourage experimentation and create a dialogue around the alternative presentation of artwork. The project encourages ephemeral approaches to react to the restrictions of creating outdoor site-responsive work for the 48hr exhibition.

For this piece, I loosely moulded an ear shape, filling it with re-purposed artichoke flowers; tying and painting them into the structure. Designed from a pun on the phrase Woz ere and the traces of the city and peoples’ actions within it, this piece is made from locally grown materials and was walked through Burgess park to the exhibition space for further encounters with the neighbourhood context and location of the building.

Sidestep Group Exhibition of female artists curated by Anna Lytridou 23.02 - 11.03 // Set Set Set Ealing

Delighted to take part in this all female exhibition Side Step curated by Anna Lytridou. This exhibition brings together works by artists whose practices do not fall squarely into one type of art making bracket.

I was delighted to exhibit Rake #3. One of an ongoing series of collaged paintings pairing world leaders with garden rakes - the research and raking continues. This rake featurs the Queen.