Alice Instone makes paintings, films, games and places.
For over twenty years her work has explored the stories we tell, the rituals we inherit, drawing on folklore, psychology, theatre and everyday life.
Her practice moves freely between the gallery, the landscape and the spaces where people gather. It has taken the form of phantasmagorical paintings, oracular temples, giant bird-women, a huge cat-head to sit inside, handmade books, films, collages exploring ancestry, gardens and memory and large-scale public projects, as well as games and shared meals.
She has collaborated with institutions including the United Nations, Oxfam, EY, Chanel, Tate Modern, the British Houses of Parliament, the National Trust, the British Medical Association, Westminster City Council, the Royal Society of Arts and Hollywood's Chateau Marmont.
At the heart of her practice is Luckhurst in the Kent countryside: a working studio, garden and gathering place where many of these projects are imagined, made and experienced. Rather than treating art as something separate from life, Instone brings the two together, creating occasions that people step into as much as they observe.
“ It’s such good snooping…. an exhibition by the artist Alice Instone offers a peek into the day-to-day lives of Cherie Blair, Emma Freud and Shami Chakrabarti in their own words…”as an artist I’m interested in mark making… they’re people’s real writing, scribbling; they’re more alive than a lot of drawings”. Yet she also thinks of them as tiny, candid portraits, a sort of opposite to the Instagram edit of someone’s life, with all the tedious, incidental details intact… Instone’s interest in the imbalance of domestic work… - a position borne out by my own unscientific study at the office - is a continuation of the artists’s long-held fascination with women and power.”
- Nancy Durrant, The Times
Alice’s exhibitions have been extensively featured in The Times, The Observer, The Independent, The Guardian, The Standard and The Telegraph by journalists including Nancy Durrant, Caitlin Moran, India Knight and Kate Kellaway. Alice has made several appearances on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, also The Chris Evans Radio 2 Breakfast Show and Jenny Eclair for Radio 4. Additional media includes Vogue, Elle, Harpers, BBC Radio, BBC TV and The Huffington Post.
