Alice Browne | Found

About

Browne is interested in the complexity of responses to the space beneath our feet. She has made a series of paintings resulting from experiences and thoughts regarding the desire of humans to understand, measure and share the wealth of the earth. The work in Found is inspired by visits to entrance-fee paying caves in France and Majorca, the slate quarries of North Wales, and the writing of Georges Bataille.

With a nod to Tintype’s former life as a shop and in reference to the gift shops that spring up when caves are commercialised, Browne is making a series of plaster cast, hand-painted toes that serve as tea light holders to be displayed in the gallery window. The toe - revered by Bataille as the misshapen, overlooked point of human connection to the earth and admired by Browne in the ‘giant’ feet of Rodin’s Burghers - takes on a symbolic significance.

Alice Browne’s paintings and works on paper occupy multiple planes and visual languages with colour always leading or even dictating form, “colours themselves create their own spaces within the painting”. Layering, playing with space, flatness and perspective are consistent preoccupations, but in these new works there is a strong feeling of weight and balance – a sense of being taken into a physical space; wedge shapes, triangles, hints of stairs, ladders, measuring tape, hands, cogs and wheels – hover and beckon.

ALICE BROWNE lives and works in London. She studied at Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art.