Alice Wilson’s SAVOY (2024) is a dense vertical forest of brightly coloured construction timbers with schematic outlines of dwellings and architectural elements at their tips, standing next to the existing Artist’s Hut, which Wilson has entirely wrapped in a monochromatic photograph of a sunlit Scottish forest.

It is a work that dissolves material and architectural hierarchies. Construction timber, telegraph pole and photographic representation all have equal status in the sculpture. Black and white photography engulfs the only architectural structure in the garden, the Artist’s Hut, creating a depiction of a forest space in which the mind is invited to wander. Pieces of home, window and outlines of small houses are powerfully thrust aloft, framing fragments of sky. The cast of a simple and anonymous dwelling sits on top of its telegraph pole, a defiant mediator between hut and hotel.

Wilson is interested in the human convention of naming homes and how it creates and marks human attachment to place. Passing The Savoy hotel on her daily walk along The Strand during her residency at The Artist’s Garden, she reflected on her sculpture and the hotel being at opposite ends of a spectrum materially but aligned in their capacity to mark imaginative space.

For Wilson, the act of making by hand, and leaving plentiful evidence of each process, is fundamental to both her and our understanding of materials and meaning.

About Alice Wilson

Alice Wilson's practice regularly uses elements of landscape furniture and structures such as gates, benches, chairs, huts, cabins and treehouses as both subject and object. She identifies the use of residencies as a way to gain distance and make space for the unknown in her work.

Wilson rejects the specificity of a particular form or site. Instead, she is interested in exploring ideas of home and space. It is not a final representation that she works towards, but through the act of construction she is able to understand better what the fundamental meaning of the material is for her. The majority of the material Wilson uses is not new; the nails, paint, hinges and splinters having lost their original function. However, rather than memorialising their histories, Wilson explores new ways of combining and framing her material to push it towards unfamiliarity.

She has received significant funding from the British Council and Arts Council England for research projects and exhibitions in Aarhus, Denmark (2018) and Merz Barn, Cumbria (2017.) Exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally Wilson is represented by domobaal gallery, London. Most recently she made and installed work in Mumbai, India with SqW Lab (2023.) She has work in several collections including the National Maritime Museum.

Wilson is a lecturer in Fine Art at University of the Arts London, University of East a London and on MASS an independent course dedicated to the making of sculpture.

www.alicewilson.org / @alice_m_wilson

About The Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

MARY MARY and The Artist’s Garden is realised in partnership with and supported by Westminster City Council and private philanthropists with support from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant for Rong Bao’s Yellow Path and with the kind permission of LUL/Transport for London. With thanks to WSP UK, Frieze 91 and Mezcal Reina for their support.

For more information, images or to arrange an interview please contact Mary Doherty / mary@sam-talbot.com.