Alice Wormald
Arrangements
16 September - 17 October 2015
Alice Wormald creates paintings depicting strange constructed spaces where surface and depth, representation and abstraction and naturalism and artifice converge. The works often emerge through the process of image collection and collage with a focus on natural imagery such as rocks, plants and geological formations. She exercises a controlled sense of representation, grounded in concerns around the act of painting and the physicality of paint itself, while reflecting a hallucinatory experience of space and nature.
In her most recent body of work, Wormald has used found images of flower arrangements as starting points to create a series of detailed abstract paintings. The original floral subjects are either wholly or partially removed, leaving the backdrops and vessels to become compositional tools from which to build abstracted landscapes. In bringing the background to the surface of the painting, these adapted interior scenes create a compelling encounter between depth, object and the natural world. The works operate both as imagined spaces, referencing the language of ikebana as a site of quiet contemplation of nature, and strange painted landscapes, demanding up close observation while simultaneously directing the viewer to make sense of the constructed scene before them.
Alice Wormald completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2011. Solo exhibitions include Ordinary Picture and Occluded View at Daine Singer (2014 and 2012), and In the Unreal Air at Blindside (2012). Her work is currently showing in Synthetica, a NETS touring exhibition curated by Claire Anna Watson at Wangaratta Art Gallery, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Counihan Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. She has also been included in exhibitions such as Atmosphere at Linden New Art (2015) and Vertigo, an Asialink touring exhibition at Galeri Soemardja, Bandung, Indonesia, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei, Taiwan and POSCO Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2014). Other group exhibitions include Spring 1883 Art Fair at the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne (2014) and New Horizons at Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale (2013). She is currently a finalist in the City of Albany Art Prize and has been included in awards such as the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2014), the John Leslie Art Prize (2014 – Highly Commended and 2012), the Macquarie Group Prize for Emerging Artists (2013), and the Banyule City Prize for Works on Paper (2013). Her work is held in the Gippsland Art Gallery, Darebin City Council, Fiona Myer and Joyce Nissan Collections.
