Alice Sheppard Fidler works with found spaces and materials, intervention and action, to create sculpture, installation, performance, and works on paper. Her work is sited both in and out of the gallery. She often begins by identifying a zone of rigidity (a rule, a social code, or a hard physical surface), and then working into the space around it, rubbing up against everyday conventions until their obviousness disintegrates, toying with oppositions until their hard edges loosen.

Her installations are temporary re-stagings often assembled from modular elements that travel between contexts, searching for new narratives to unfold. By transforming spaces and materials with minimal adjustments and subtle gestures, and leaning into rules and limitations, her work invites us to experience oscillations between absurdity and poignance, pointlessness and tenderness.

Her approach is often performative, critically repurposing skills from her previous career in set design and using objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. She leverages the distance between the viewer and the art object to draw attention to loss of connection or contact, and deploys found materials, with their past life of damage and care, filled with unanswered and unanswerable questions, to open us up to the unknown.

Understate

The Rule