ABOUT

Alice Instone makes artworks about shared behaviour and our need for connection and meaning. Rooted in ritual, mystery, and catharsis, her multi faceted practice expresses a belief in art as consolation. She has collaborated widely with individuals and institutions shaping our cultural conversation, including the United Nations, Oxfam, Chanel, the British Houses of Parliament, the National Trust, the Royal Society of Arts, the British Medical Association, Tate Modern, and the Chateau Marmont, Hollywood. Her works range from phantasmagorical paintings and an oracle’s temple, to games, playing cards, communal washing lines of to-do lists, books, films about searching for a cure for loneliness in space and pilgrimage, music and singing, a magic caravan, collages about ancestors and gardens, work about our favourite shoes and portraits of influential women.

Instone’s work is defined by interaction as much as by objects. Over 20 years, she has developed participatory frameworks that invite audiences into shared reflection, transforming everyday materials into sites of play, ritual, and emotional exchange. Participation is intrinsic to her approach, activating artworks as evolving encounters shaped by collective experience.

Her paintings are conceptually grounded, informed by memory and storytelling and closely intertwined with her participatory work. They capture individual and collective narratives, often focusing on women, personal histories, and archetypal themes. Projects such as 21 21st Century Women (2008) combined biography, identity, and social commentary through portraiture. In The Snakes & Ladders Project (2026), familiar forms become metaphors for life’s unpredictability, using colour and composition to suggest movement, risk, and togetherness. Because a Fire Was in My Head (2010) explored inner states, alchemy, language and compulsion; allowing space for unresolved truths.

Her Hollywood residency, Tell Me Everything You Saw And What You Think It Means (2017–19), extended these interests into painting and writing, examining memory, perception, and the afterlife of images. Hollywood cinema is approached as a contemporary myth-making system, echoing the oracular structures found elsewhere in her work. Across her practice, Instone explores how meaning is generated through symbolic frameworks—games, rituals, ancestral voices, and cinematic archetypes—rather than fixed narratives.

Play, ritual, and transformation animate much of Instone’s work. A Visit to the Oracle (2023) immersed participants in interactive spaces for reflection, while The Motherhouse (2022) created a symbolic environment in which visitors externalised inner thoughts through ritual. Films including Oracle (2021), winner of Best Fantasy at the Cannes Short Film Festival, and Seeker (2025) extend her interest in myth and collective storytelling. Works such as Playing Cards With My Grandmother (2018) foreground intergenerational exchange and playful insight.

A feminist perspective runs throughout Instone’s approach. 21 21st Century Women addressed the absence of women in art history, while The Pram in the Hall (2016) made visible hidden domestic labour and caregiving. Projects including She Should Have Known Better (2013) and The House of Fallen Women (2010) offered critiques of gendered expectations and cultural double standards, reclaiming marginalised narratives. The Motherhouse reflected on home and motherhood as sites of agency, continuity, and creativity.

Memory remains central to Instone’s work: active, collective, and continually renewed. In The Book of Grandmothers (2018) and The Book of Self-Loathing (2023), participant contributions explored family, identity, and self-perception. Across her practice, Instone draws audiences towards a shared reservoir of memories, stories and images that imbue life with depth, resonance, connection and possibility.