Delicate Vessels Emerge from Garden-Grown Materials in Alice Fox’s Woven Sculptures
“Clutch Vessel #43.” Photo by Curtis James. All images © Alice Fox, shared with permission
Limpets, the cone-shaped sea snails we see attached to boulders along salty shorelines, can live between 10 and 20 years, never straying too far from home. They always return to the same spot, gradually wearing a perfectly-sized ring in the surface of the rock, known as home scars. Eventually, empty shells wash up along the coast, and for Alice Fox, the dainty specimens provide one of many canvases for delicately woven pieces (previously).
Fox grows materials like nettle, bramble, and bindweed in her garden allotment in West Yorkshire, where activity shifts from season to season. “My gardening provides food for my kitchen and materials for my work, and it is impossible to separate the two from one another,” she tells Colossal. “The allotment shed becomes an outdoor studio during the summer, drying and gathering my plant fibres, before moving these to my home studio before the damp of autumn sets in.”
Hen eggs provide a scale and form that Fox finds alluring when it comes to wrapping them in both soft and rigid materials. Her series Clutch is part of a series of 50 vessels constructed for an exhibition titled Making:50, which celebrates the organization’s half century run—and counting. From moss to eggshells to garden implements, Fox intricately envelops found objects to give them new life. This year, thanks to funding from the Theo Moorman Trust for Weavers, the artist has been focusing on developing new work using her own allotment-grown flax.
You can see Fox’s work in STILL, alongside sculptor Juliet Gutch, at Tinker Gallery in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, through August 10, and the exhibition Full Bloom at jaggedart in London through August 16. Her work is also included in Sympoiesis at Forum Arte Braga in Portugal through September 15, and she is working on a new book titled Wild Weave, which is slated for release next autumn from Batsford Books. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
Stitched limpet shells
Moss cloth fragment
“Clutch Vessel #23.” Photo by Curtis James
“Clutch Vessel #32”
“Hybrid 3: Blue Spade & Bramble.” Photo by Sarah Mason
“Hybrid 7: Scraper, Beech & Bindweed.” Photo by David Lindsay
“Hybrid 8: Fork & Bindweed”
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