Alice Channer has attracted national and international critical interest for her sculptures and textile works that explore the relationship between the human body, personal adornment, materials and sculpture. Using techniques associated with fashion – pleating, folding, cutting and draping – and often incorporating materials from high and low fashion Channer questions established hierarchies within the history of art, objects and clothing and interrogates the role that clothing plays in a western late capitalist society through highly attuned and sensitive formal arrangements in space.
Channer’s investigation of the history of sculpture as a medium and of figuration as a starting point for sculptural ideas often emerge from hermetic and elusive origins – iconic vintage designs by Christian Dior or drawings by Yves Saint Laurent – and she will often encode herself physically in some way within her work in a way that is not immediately legible, implicating herself within the work’s conceptual territory. However, it is in the seductive and charged formal power of her work, where formats and materials shifts from one substance to another, that she quietly alludes to the very contemporary idea that the body may be a fugitive entity without a precise shape or location.
Alice Channer (born, 1977 in Oxford) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include, Cold Blood, Lisa Cooley, New York (2012), Out of Body, South London Gallery, London (2012), Body-Conscious, The Approach, London (2011) and Inhale, Exhale, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, as part of the Glasgow International, Scotland (2010). Alice Channer was one of the participating artists in Drawing Sculpture, Drawing Room London and Leeds City Art Gallery touring show (2012), Contemporary Collection Display: The Space Between, Tate Britain, London (2012), The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012), Caroline Achaintre, Sara Barker, Alice Channer, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2012) and Hard Metal Body, Art on the Underground Central Line Series commission for Notting Hill Gate tube station, London (2012) among many others. Forthcoming exhibitions include Invertebrates, The Hepworth Wakefield (2013). Alice Channer is represented by The approach, London.
