Alice Cunningham on Renewal and Responsibility
- clare4684
- Jan 5
- 3 min read
A few weekends ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the artist, Alice Cunningham, during the Somerset Open Studios. She works from her home in north Somerset in a garden studio; a refurbished shed, nestled in a leafy garden, populated with a slide, swing set and stone sculptures.
Revitalising and repurposing otherwise disregarded materials and spaces is a recurring theme in your work. Where do you source your materials from?
“All of the timber I use comes from Somerset wood recycling or I salvage it from pallets. The stone I use is often surplus stone from other sculptors. I buy bits of stone from them that they aren't using. The sandstone used for Tipping Point was saved from the scrap heap and would otherwise have been broken down and used as aggregate. I love finding things that are discarded, giving them a new life and turning them into precious objects.”
So your love of natural materials has developed into a career! You predominantly work with stone and clay. Tell me about your first experience working with marble?
“It was during a residency with the RSS in Pietrasanta that I was first exposed to stone carving at scale. I visited the quarries at Pietrasanta and its better-known neighbour, Carrara. The exposed rock faces were absolutely gorgeous, brutal and beautiful in equal measure. To be carving up our landscape like that, the human impact on the mountains, at that scale, is quite horrific. But the beauty of the material and the cut face of the mountain is exquisite.”
The way you address this dichotomy shows a strong sense of responsibility toward the environment. Is this a serious concern in your practice?
"Absolutely, it guides my practice, from the materials I use to the form of the works and the projects I take on. I tackled the issue of climate change head on during a later residency at the University of Bristol in the Earth Sciences department, working under the title What does Climate Change look like? Over the course of this project, I interviewed scientists across disciplines, all studying the effects of climate change, translating the commonality of their findings into a series of stone sculptures."
Tell me about your latest work.
“Time Makes a Mockery of us All, which I finished last night, is made from a gorgeous piece of Devonian marble. When I saw the fleshy pink freckled surface, I instantly thought of the female form and began playing with these bulbous undulating shapes.”
I love the contrast between the highly polished pink surface which abruptly meets the natural rough texture of the stone. What prompted you to create this contrast?
“By leaving some elements of the natural surface of the stone, it reminds us how easily we can overlook the natural materials around us and highlights their preciousness.”
Finally, let’s look forward! What does the future hold for you?
"I have been experimenting with unfired polished clay and tone. It's the same stuff, it's just a different geological time frame. Stone and clay have a beautiful relationship and that’s what has inspired me to work with them together. You don’t often see them combined in art, despite them being natural bedfellows in the landscape.
"I’m really excited about making some more site-specific, large-scale, interventions in the landscape, using those methods and sourcing clay and stone from the same areas, creating these slightly perturbing installations. The power of installation and sculpture is that it reinvigorates your natural instincts to an environment or a scenario, as we spoke about earlier. (Here, Alice is referring to our previous conversation about Mike Nelson’s 2023 Hayward show, Extinction Beckons, that we both loved and found very unnerving.) An audience can be so awakened and enlivened by mixing up materials and putting them in people’s way.”
For enquiries about Alice’s work, please contact clare@edensculpture.com.
