Alice
New Zealand born, woman artist; Alice Blackley has painted all her life. Her unconventional upbringing has contributed to her nomadic lifestyle in which she constantly challenges herself as a contemporary artist. She moves easily between an array of art genres: installation, performance, realism, abstraction and post modernism; it is difficult to label her style. Her natural versatility allows her to cross mediums in particular, oil, pastel, watercolour, and acrylic.
Her oeuvre is connected by an underpinning love of landscape and a quest for personal discovery and spiritualism.
Alice was a mature student when she finally went to art school at Elam, Auckland University (1993). In her third year she staged a major controversial exhibition that was on every T.V channel in the country. The footage was sent to the prestigious art school in London; Goldsmiths College where she was subsequently accepted into the two year Post Graduate Fine Arts programme. In her first year she staged a provocative end of year performance, which was labeled the best artwork since Damien Hurst’s era, a decade before. The following year she was invited to perform with performance artist Gary Stevens at MOMA in Oxford straight after graduating with an M.A.
After a few turbulent years of trying to decide on her county of residence, Alice returned to N.Z to build a studio on her parent’s farm in the Papamoa hills in the Bay of Plenty. Her work at this stage had developed into solo walks across vast areas of the South Island. Her love for the high country and the sense of isolation lured her to Queenstown in 2005 where she now lives, continuing to exhibit in both islands of New Zealand.