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.

Scorched Floral Firescreen 23.09 - 25.09.22 // Strawberry Hill Flower Festival

An annual festival curated by Leigh Chappell and Janne Ford showcasing the very best of British grown flowers and sustainable flower arranging techniques in partnership with Flowers from the Farm. 

Scorched Floral Firescreen was created as a response to the extreme heat of Summer 2022. Although clearly not a functional design, the materials it contains have been well and truly tested. It is made with dried grasses and flowers from Flowers from the Farm growers Char Johnston and dried dahlias from Philippa Stewart.

For more information please visit: Strawberry Hill Flower Festival

Dried Tablescape Demonstration with Flowers from the Farm 09.07.22 // RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Show

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.

Visor 09 - 10.07.22 // National Garden Open Scheme, Lieneke's Flowers, Cae Rhydau

On the 9 – 10th July Lieneke and Victor will be opening their garden Cae Rhydau, Caernafon via National Garden Open Scheme for the first time. Lieneke a Dutch RHS Gold Medallist florist has very kindly invited me to exhibit a floral artwork in her garden alongside her own work.

This Summer inspired by bright light, long views, wind beaten trees surrounding my new temporary home in Anglesey, I have been thinking of the Australian landscape and my early childhood in Melbourne.

Thanks to brilliant Amy McDonnell and Zero Hour campaign co-ordinator and Permaculture Book Group collaborator for her willingness to work in wind and rain.

Thanks to Lieneke, who kindly suggested the collaboration, on the right and her dog Fleur (the larger of two) and Rod on the left, who I met on the Pilgrimage for Nature last year.

Using cut willow which was drying on site we built a visor shaped install as a nod to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series. In these famous Australian paintings the outlaw, murderer, bushranger Ned Kelly merges with landscape. The violence encompassed by his actions is depicted in a naieve bright style by the painter who inhabits this outsider. In this series Nolan reflects on European ties, both via his personal experience and of Australia’s involvement in the Second World War and Western painting tradition and there is a sense of both belonging and staunch independence cultivated at the same time.

I like the visor shape as a starting point for reflecting on how we have a blinkered view of the landscape according to what we know of it, whilst simultaneously providing a viewpoint to look at the landscape from and opportunity to look at the tool of our own blinkeredness, which hopefully expands the vision.

I see this work very much as a prototype; the design changed rapidly given materials and stability in the wind, and I think that the coverage of mesh could be further developed to reflect different sites. The visor panels also act as a temporary divider and having worked on it flat we created a trampled stage area within it and series of pathways up through the grass to the artwork. Perhaps this space could also be used for further reflection on the landscape as well as the armour we build around ourselves and how our views are informed by both indiviudal and collective vision.

Futura Glitch, Livia Rita and The Avant Gardeners 04.05.22 // Sadlers Wells

Delightful evening with Livia Rita and the Avant Gardeners - wild card - at Sadlers Wells.

I created three pairs of blooming displays within Livia’s shoes. It was wonderful to see them inaction and leave heart buouyant after a night of her creatures, all stomping out gleeful.

For more information about Livia Rita www.liviarita.com