Alice Taylor

A square piece of white waxed fabric that has been manipulated with hand stitching.

Alice Taylor is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in London. Her work currently focuses on sculpture, word, film and body, considering the ecological and emotional landscapes involved in making and moving.

Before joining the RCA, Alice has worked in bespoke tailoring and costume for companies such as Alexander McQueen and Huntsman & Sons. Alongside her work, Alice founded a clothing brand collaborating with rural artisans in India, addressing social and environmental circularity, craftsmanship and transparency. The experiences and learnings shared were invaluable, leading Alice to question the current fashion industry, the future of it and the systems within it.

Developing a new practice, Alice uses endurance, exploration and physical materialisation to ask questions around what it means to make in different environments, in alternative physical states, as a woman and as a maker. Her approach is inspired by the connections found between material, maker and landscape in rural locations.

Capturing the form of endured physical moments, Alice takes an instinctive and circular path to unite material, environment, body and mind.

Person swimming in the sea with head above water.

The beginnings of this body of work were drawn from a deeply instinctive and intimate place, merging personal, shared and physical experiences with the intention to concentrate on who I am as a creative and to better understand where my work can exist.

‘Endurance’ is a word I have been fully engaged with during my time at RCA. I believe it holds an individual and collective importance in all that is living and non-living, it is happening all around us, inside of us and alongside us.

As we move, we endure.

As we adapt, we endure.

As we remember, we endure.

Endurance sports and high-altitude experiences are catalysts in my work to reimagine familiar processes in order to build new ones. Whilst training, I use instinctive stitching and dismantled bespoke tailoring techniques to manipulate natural and surplus fabrics. This creates new material topographies of the surrounding landscapes in which we swim, cycle, run and climb, emphasising our co-existence to nature. The hand stitched pieces are multi-layered in message, as they act as documents of the physical and emotional journeys involved in endured movement.

My work is influenced by how we can use our bodies as voices. As women in sport, we step outside of society’s ideals of femininity, and into a space of exposure, strength and freedom. The paths of stitches found in my work are symbolic of the emotional healing found in sport, however they further represent narratives, personal and global, of how we continue to fight for autonomy over our bodies.

‘Materialising Endurance’ is a series of structures that ask how we can gently dismantle to rebuild better, how we might listen to our emotional selves to find solutions towards a world we want to share together, where worlds can collide. It further communicates how, as artists, we set boundaries between what we share through our work, and what we choose to keep to ourselves.

'Recover'

A work in progress of a new found practice working with soft sculpture, physical materialisation and emotional healing.

‘Recover’ is first in a series of material structures that become bodies of their own as they bend, fold and stand. Acting as sheltered spaces, with shelters being places in which we shield and share.

Hand stitched material manipulation forms the basis of this work. As I train for endurance triathlon, I draw with needle and thread, stitching the physical and emotional layers which embody us as we move.

Deconstructed bespoke tailoring techniques act as landscaping tools to document the paths and journeys undertaken through endurance activities, hand stitched instinctively, yet observationally from the surrounding topographies in which I train individually and collectively.

Alice Taylor

'Recover'

Social

About

Royal College of Art