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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Delighted to be asked by Flowers from the Farm - a supportive network of British Flower growers and florists wishing to work with seasonal flowers and sustainable practices - to give a demonstration at their RHS Flower School at the RHS Hampton Court Palace and Garden Show.
All flowers used in the school were to be grown no further than a thirty mile radius away and I was partnered up with Claire at Plant Passion; a Flower Farm just outside of Guildford.
A couple of days before the show, knowing that I wanted to work with flowers which would for the most part be dried or dry out I went to visit her field and make a selection. I was immediately drawn to everything that you cannot find at the market and that was in a dried and drying out stage quite naturally in the field. This included a huge selection of grasses, dock, phacelia, honesty as well as these jumbo helichrysum.
On the demonstration day it was a delight to see the flowers all conditioned and cut by Claire that morning.
Here I am, in a pose akin to traffic control demonstrating a dried tablescape which can be left to dry out and sit as an everlasting artwork. The work can be viewed from all sides and also from the top. It would suit a low lying table or being put somewhere it would not be disturbed and must be out of wind as it is a piece which is balanced.
To construct this I worked with two re-purposed boiler tops, fashioned into bowls by Rye artist Peter Edwards. Dried and curling climbing hydrangea whirls were then balnaced within them. These provide movement in the piece and extra stability between the two bowls, which have very small bases. Two loose hand tied bouquets were then balanced in the bowls and other light flowers, limonium and grasses added in to soften the shape. Within these structures there is also space for jars with floral pins in to support small fresh pockets of flowers which can change more immediately with what is outside. The piece was then completed with a dried allium garland and the start of a fresh achillea chain. All the colours over time would fade but I hoped that the garlands could bring in further movement to work in and through the arrangement and shape of the whirls.
Underneath is a picture of Claire demonstrating how to make a button hole and the Flowers from the farm team, all of whom it was a pleasure to meet and work with.
