Alice Balfe is a freelance artist, photographer, filmmaker and designer. She has recently received a First Class degree in Fine Art from Oxford Brooks University.
Since graduating she has produced numerous large commissions, sent work abroard and promoted and managed her own business as a freelance artist and gained experience working as a gallery Assistant manager. She is currently exhibiting works in popular venue, gallery, social enterprise and craft brewery in Oxford.
Alice creates large scale contemporary abstract works that are heavily textured, viewing the canvas as a surface as opposed to a representational image. Her practice explores material, building up the surface, layering pigment and cement like substance called Pargeting. This physical process enables her to continually uncover the wider questions surrounding memory, identity, the fragility of perception and space. Situated in the tensions of these considerations, her experimental process facilitates the consideration of her generational family’s experience as Irish immigrants and the tensions of being grounded in place conflicted with feelings of separation, as well as other questions and complexities of our current cultural moment. These considerations are expressed in scraped mark making, cracks and heaviness of the surface, that engages with an expanded field of painting.
Her work engages with the conversation surrounding the expansion of painting within contemporary art, especially working as a young female artist today.
She has successfully transferred and utilised a variety of creative processes and skills, applying them to business settings, aiming to empower and promote the core principles, people and story underpinning them. Her experience ranges from photographing events and portraits, filmmaking, working with companies in branding, marketing and promotion, to curating exhibitions.
