My work is concerned with emotion, with memory and loss. It is the ethereal instability of both memory and emotion that has increasingly come to influence my painting. The basis of my practice is shaped by my visual diary, which in turn is shaped by my life. I update it daily – a random, unpredictable record of the day’s events, left raw and unfinished. I embrace various materials and techniques including printmaking and sculpture. I do not try to control or restrain my process of working. I have no desire for perfection or neatness. I prefer an unvarnished approach where things are allowed to develop. Apparent inaccuracies become embedded in the work much as they do in life.
http://www.aliceleach.com
Currently working on a sketchbook for the Brooklyn sketchbook project and I am busy organising a major exhibition for Dartington Hall School. Part of a unique experiment, for 60 years Dartington was in the vanguard of a new style of progressive education. Many practising artists, some of them refugees fleeing Europe such as Naum Slutzky of the Bauhaus, taught there and in the arts centre on the estate.
The combination of the professional arts and education was far-sighted and original. The School rapidly became a Mecca for imaginative parents and their children. Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Lucian Freud, Oliver Postgate and Susan Williams-Ellis all in their different ways played a part in the Dartington story. Over a span of two generations the creative artists who were touched by the School’s ambitious vision are too numerous to name.
The exhibition will include works on loan from the Dartington Trust, some of which have never been exhibited publicly before. Built up by Dorothy Elmhirst, one of the School’s founders, this collection shows the extraordinary wealth of artists teaching in the early years, such as Cecil Collins, Mark Tobey, Willi Soukop, Bernard and David Leach and Hein Heckroth, who later won an Oscar for his set designs for “The Red Shoes”.
