Alice Bray: Sidewinder
Working predominantly in painting or with the found image, Alice Bray’s practice is concerned with organic, yet other-worldly, imagery.
Working predominantly in painting or with the found image, Alice Bray’s practice is concerned with organic, yet other-worldly, imagery. Each piece is an exploration into the secrecy of labyrinthine symbolism. She adopts cultic motifs with deep multifaceted histories, such as the snake, and transforms them into her own graphic language while seeking not to impose upon the already loaded semiotics.
Sidewinder brings together Bray’s latest body of works, conté tracings on paper, with her collection of found postcards - hints of which are visible in Bray’s drawings. This series sees the artist’s work stripped back to the tools that she would typically build her paintings from; the conté and parchment paper hero the way in which the final image of these works are forged. Likewise, Sidewinder features an assortment of postcards, collected by Bray over the years, that would serve as reference imagery and in this case, offer insight into the thought-process behind the artist’s graphic and slightly hypnotic subject matter.
Alice Bray is in her Honours year at the University of Canterbury's Ilam School of Fine Arts, studying towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She has previously exhibited at Next Gallery and the Ilam Campus Gallery in Christchurch as well as at Millers O’Brien in Wellington. She is the recipient of the Bickerton-Widdowson Trust Scholarship for 2019. Sidewinder is her first solo exhibition.