ALEXIS ZELDA STEVENS

ALEXIS SAYS:

My work encompasses installation, dance and image making. Previous major works (pre 2010) involved the construction of environments in white cube settings and on outdoor sites. These integrated formal elements, fabricated and usually abstract, with made or found objects. Room-filling in scale they required the mobile viewer to explore the scene in order for meaning to unfold over a duration of time. They often involved urgent colour, selected to illicit a physical response in the viewer.  

As a development, the form and content current work is informed by the physical and spatial elements of my own experience of the body and of moving through space against gravity (I’m a contemporary dancer). I explore the characteristics of dynamic energy interacting with matter: flow/stagnation; balance; tension; slump; bulge; transference through touch/imprints of an occurrence; pull and twist; how one thing speaks to another across a space; the giving of weight between one object and another.

My generative process is rooted in collage and studies are led by a hands-on, physical enquiry into materials:  imposing structure on them during improvised explorations; piling, balancing, propping, leaning; and making spatial formations. As part of this process I take numerous digital images which go back into the pool to be collaged with, currently blown up to A0 size and inserted into spatial arrangements of materials. 

ABOUT ALEXIS:

Solo shows include ArtSway where Alexis was Artist in Residence. Notable group shows include Phoenix Arts Association where Confronting the Gaze was the lead work, and Wheal Art Weekend a site-specific artist led initiative produced by Level2 and held outdoors at Wheal Francis Mine, a Cornish world heritage site. In 2010 she was the single visual artist invited to participate on a two week-long professional development residency for choreographers called The Big Intensive (Jerwood Studio programme).

Mentions in the press include a Pick of the Week in The Guardian and article The St.Ives New School in New York Arts Magazine by critic Max Andrews, both for her solo show at ArtSway. Catalogues were produced for ArtSway and Wheal Art Weekend and her essays on the dialogue between the visual arts and dance were first published online by advocacy body Dance UK in 2010.

A number of Alexis' paintings and drawings are privately owned and she has been supported by Arts Council England (Grants for The Arts), The Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and The ArtHouse, Doncaster. Alexis was an AN Re-view Bursary holder in 2010, a Morethan12 bursary holder in 2005 and won an Erasmus Scholarship to study at L'Accademia di Belle Arte Venice in 2003. She holds a first class BA Honours in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art (now University College Cornwall) and a Certificate of Higher Education in Dance Performance Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. 

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