Alice Briggs
About Alice
Alice’s creative practice is inspired by communities, sites, place making, and the landscapes of Mid Wales where she lives.
Alice facilitates links across sectors (arts and farming, science and performance) to make change and support the communities in the rural landscape of Mid Wales. The historical and symbolic meaning and resonance of objects have become a central part of her practice through her role as a museum curator.
Alice creates work with different materials, often found in the landscape around her. She is drawn to study aspects of family history, using objects and costume belonging to my grandmother to create performance and to transform everyday familial items. Her role as a mother and a daughter seep into her work through fairytales, folk tales and the importance of care.
Alice’s time in Cwm Elan became a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of growth and exploration to reconnect with herself at a watershed and turbulent moment in her life. An opportunity to use creativity and the natural environment of the site as a place to question, reflect and transform.
Studying the rituals and traditions of the land, and representations of birds and animals, the life and death of animals and cycles of life fascinate Alice and act as a source of healing for the anger and frustration of unmet promises and betrayals that life has thrown at her. She immerses herself in the landscape where she lives, creating ritual from the land through swimming, running and walking. Her immersion in the place is documented through the camera lens, and then processed through alternative photography and other media.
The liminal space between the above and below, the edges of land, our thoughts, and the in between of living in a landscape rooted in Welsh culture all hold a fascination for Alice. It represents the both/and, the bittersweet of what life throws at us and a metaphor for the internal and external world of our minds and the physical space around us and between us all.
Over the summer 2022 Alice embarked on a series of performative walk/swim actions across the landscape of the Elan valley. Embodying herself within the river through a durational series of walks within the and around the riverbed and river edge. These walk/swims, which were filmed using go pros and film cameras became a meditative mindful space from which she could view the valley from the deepest perspective in the landscape. The walks took Alice below bridges and through gorges, initially occupied with visitors to the valley, surprised as she emerged out of the river before them. Alice is interested in facilitating points of connection, and the analogies and problems of the river dividing, and the bridge connecting are interesting as a metaphor that I continue to explore.
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Alice used the residency in the valley to explore the area with her parents and children, but particularly her father, discussing the history/archaeology/culture of the land and personal memories of the Elan Valley.
She walked with my father, an archaeologist, through the passing places of landscape over the Elan valley and explored the dam bed with her children and parents during the summer. They visited the foundations of the kitchen garden of Nant Gwyllt mansion which had become exposed during the summer with the low water levels, in a re-enactment of a moment in her childhood when she had visited the site with her parents and three sisters. Alice had a half-forgotten memory of parched, cracked soil on the floor of the valley, which became an important moment of connection between the past and the present. An above and below, where the land and the walls of the mansions garden were exposed after a century below the water. The negative space becoming a positive, exposing unseen memories and histories of the place.
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