Artists Index: Alice Theobald

Alice Theobald was born in Leicester, UK in 1985. She lives and works in Birmingham, UK. Theobald works across a wide range of media including live performance, video, installation, sound, text and sculpture and composes musical scores for her works. Her work fluctuates between script and improvisation and highlights the unstable relationship between art, communication and representation. Often conflating sentimental tropes, cliche and social archetypes with absurdist and dead-pan humour, Theobald addresses accepted concepts of spectacle and emotion and uses performance as both starting point and subject matter to magnify aspects of everyday life and typically introspective thought. Borrowing from the vocabulary of cinema, television, theatre, literature and soundtracks, her practice is concerned with the desire for authenticity and commodification of emotion and what this might say about empathy, aspiration and how we (mis)communicate. Recent solo exhibitions include: IL Y AURA (There will be), South London Gallery, London UK, 2022 and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris FR, 2022; We May Believe Or We May Never Know, The White House, CREATE, Dagenham UK, 2018; Weddings And Babies, Pilar Corrias, London UK, 2017; The Next Step, Two Queens, Leicester UK, 2016; It’s Not Who You Are, it’s How You Are with Atomik Architecture, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead UK, 2015. Selected performances include: Ballad of Simple Women, Abu Dhabi Art Fair AE, 2020; What Not To Wear Our My Soul, Art Night, Walthamstow UK, 2019; You’ve got my back and I’m on your side, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims FR, 2017 and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on Sea UK, 2016; I’ve said yes now that’s it, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, 2014. She is also co-founder of the music/artist-collective Ravioli Me Away with Sian Dorrer and Rosie Ridgway; In 2019 they created the alt-opera "The View from Behind the Futuristic Rose Trellis" which toured the UK to Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Box Plymouth and Block Universe at The Albany, Deptford.