Alice Dudgeon
Ash Basket
Alice Dudgeon b. 1995 studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art going on to train alongside Scottish furniture makers, learning and honing traditional woodworking techniques. She received the Graduate Studio Award at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and subsequently exhibited as part of the New Contemporaries show at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 2022 she was invited by sculptor David Nash to exhibit at MAKE Southwest in ‘Artful Craft’.
Her work is characterised by lightweight, intricate, wooden structures. Selecting labour-intensive and repetitive processes, she celebrates the irregularity of the natural material whilst evidencing the hand. Elements of her work bow, spin, pierce and reach outward, mimicking the shapes and patterns observed around her studio on a farm in rural Hampshire.
Most recently, she has presented a collection of steam-bent, carved, and ebonised sculptures the size of insects observed in the entomology collection at Hampshire Cultural Trust.
Making Ash Basket provided an opportunity to push material to its limits and represent traditional, dynamic agricultural processes.
Constructed from a fallen tree in the Scottish borders, wood was air dried over several years to prevent cracking. Once ready, it was steam bent (introduced to steam in a sealed box), softening it and allowing it to be manipulated into tight curves to form the basket-like structure. Joined with handmade ash pegs, it contains hundreds of seed-like forms that have been carved and suspended on linen thread allowing them to spin freely. When a breeze catches this sculpture it comes to life, inspired by the process of winnowing where wheat is separated from chaff by tossing it up energetically in the wind.
Hampshire