Alice Hartley is an artist originally from the East Hampshire South Downs, now living and working in London. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2013, Hartley has continued to explore surface as a way of understanding emotional connection to the land, and the psychological spaces that exist between memory and desire. These spaces consider half-lived experiences, the political and emotional confusion of modernity, and the tension between false barriers and the urgency to release and escape. Recurring motifs of jagged edges, hovering awkward shapes, and ambiguous, gleaming fragments of text run through her work. At times impatient, at others tender, her paintings often contradict themselves- seeking both confrontation and gentleness.

Hartley’s process often begins with returning to the basics: mono-printing with the silk screen or monotype from the relief press, where intuition guides her hand. From these small beginnings, larger works evolve into site-specific installations that extend across gallery walls and billboards. Recently, Hartley has returned to traditional approaches to surface- laying grounds of gesso to build sculptural paintings in oil, beeswax and pigment. These new works continue her enduring preoccupation with surface; binding together fragments of her past with what she imagines still to come.