Alice Channer

Publication Launch: Heavy Metals / Silk Cut
With Alice Channer, Jes Fernie & Daisy Hildyard
Thursday 5 December 2024, 18.30 – 20.30

Forma is delighted to present the UK launch of Alice Channer’s glossy, glamorous first monograph. Heavy Metals / Silk Cut was published on the occasion of her double survey exhibitions across Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle Appenzell, CH, in 2023.

The monograph features photographic series imaginatively documenting several of the multiple births of Channer’s sculptures. These images sit amongst essays by Rosanna McLaughlin and Zoë Gray, a fiction by Daisy Hildyard, a conversation between Alice Channer and exhibition curator Stefanie Gschwend, and comprehensive documentation of exhibitions and works from the last 13 years.

The launch evening will feature Alice Channer in conversation with curator Jes Fernie, e x p a n d i n g their ongoing discussions around experimental sculpture and the politics of materiality. They will be joined by Daisy Hildyard who will read from the multiple voices of Hair in my Mouth, her short fiction specially commissioned for the book.

Heavy Metals / Silk Cut, designed by Mathias Clottu and published by Distanz, will be available at a special launch price in a book signing in Presse Books after the reading and talk.

"We live in occult times, in a globalised world dominated by the wants of convenience oriented societies that obfuscate supply chains, material processes and labour relations. In this context, Channer’s work has always struck me as particularly brave. Through a combination of determination, fearlessness and curiosity, she has found ways to infiltrate the realm of production, to ask questions about the nature of materiality and the formation of subjecthood from within, learning to speak of the tools and techniques that shape our experience of the material world, and our place within it, in their own tongue."

From The Stitch Unpicker, by Rosanna McLaughlin.

Biographies

Alice Channer is an artist working with sculpture. Over long periods of time, she immerses herself in materials and production processes to find forms within them that she develops as sculpture. Her method is both experimental and precise, collaborating with people and machines to bring multiple bodies and voices into her polyphonic works. She lives and works in the edges of London.

Jes Fernie is a UK-based independent curator, writer and lecturer, interested in the social, political and environmental context in which art is made, situated, and viewed. In 2021, she launched the Archive of Destruction, an international research project that brings together narratives around public sculpture that has been destroyed by rage, boredom, fear, greed and love. In 2023 she curated ‘Trickster Figures’ at MK Gallery, a group show of contemporary sculpture, which included the work of Alice Channer.

Daisy Hildyard is author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in York.