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Alice Gale-Feeny – recipient of the Nottingham Castle Open 2015 ‘Solo Exhibition’ prize -presents Getting to know, a new video installation shown at Nottingham Castle for the first time. It is shown alongside works made within the past 12 months, all created especially for the Museum.

Getting to know is made up of three individual, yet interconnecting, video works that are comprised of moving image, text and narration. We observe objects, group activities and discussions that are witnessed from alternating perspectives around a number of tables, within various rooms.

According to the artist, she “makes [art]work with what currently exists and in response to what is already happening, looking directly at the relationships between objects, architectures and the human body.”  Her works appear as a commentary of the inner-thought processes of the mind. The act of speaking aloud is used as a way of focusing on the details within our subjective personal and individual experience.

The installation incorporates footage shot whilst on residency with STORE – a London-based association of artists, architects and designers, who at the time of filming had no fixed location to work from. In ‘The conditions we’ve set up for ourselves’ (2015-2016), Gale-Feeny observes STORE’s long-standing tradition of holding group meetings around shared communal meals in the houses of its members. ‘’From where I’m sitting’ (2016) features the artist, her flat-mates and their next-door neighbours. New to living in close proximity, they discuss how they each see this shared environment and how the architecture may determine their experience of the house.

These videos draw influence from the research of Phillipe Boudon (b.1941), a French academic who interviewed the inhabitants of the mid-1920s housing project ‘Quartiers Modernes Frugès’ in the south of Bordeaux for his book ‘Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited’ (pub. 1972). Originally designed by the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) as homogenous, functional and low-cost containers, they became known for having been heavily altered by their inhabitants, the artist was particualry interested in the way Boudon examines the language used by the interviewees to exemplify the ways in which the architecture functioned.

‘If you watch the pomegranate really closely’ (2016) sees a group in a darkened, unidentified room, directing their entire focus on four low-lit objects that also reoccur at points within the other videos: a glass bowl, a bunch of bananas, a pomegranate and a tomato.

Alice Gale-Feeny (b. 1989 Brighton) is an artist, lecturer and curator who lives and works in Nottingham, and gained her BA Hons in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University in 2012.

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