Walking through city spaces makes Alice Foxen curious. Her love for making and materials, combined with growing up in London, has driven a lifelong search for discarded objects and materials found in public space. For her, the street is always in a state of flux with stuff in constant chaotic harmony. These encounters with objects are Alice’s personal connection with public space. She gathers them up as memories, traces of activity on the street that sparkle for her.

From her studio in Hoxton, Alice explores these layers of collected memory through playful material research. Beginning in clay, with other materials joining in. To be in a state of flux is to constantly change and to mix with other things. Forces meet, boundaries blend, materials react. Alice’s sculpture is on the move, in a tussle between structural control and fluidity. The scale of these works invites closer inspection. Where have these objects come from, are they familiar, do they spark your curiosity?
Walking through city spaces makes Alice Foxen curious, she sees the beauty in stuff other people leave behind. Lines, geometries, and patterns fill the streets she grew up in. A discarded mattress, for example, holds a quiet beauty for Alice. An intimate, domestic object now left to droop and sag on the pavement.

Alice’s working method is often meditative and meticulous. She uses laser cut templates to achieve the correct line quality and paints on a foaming clay she developed while at the Royal College of Art to create a bubbly surface texture.

Alice has been living, working and making in London since 1990. In 2022 she graduated from the Royal College of Art with a MA in Ceramics and Glass. Her work in clay and other materials has taken her to residencies at the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark and The Vermont Studio Centre in the USA. Her work has been shown at the British Ceramics Biennale and internationally in group exhibitions.