Alice Sheppard Fidler: Showgirl and Unsettled Boundary | 5 October – 4 december 2026
Alice Sheppard Fidler
Showgirl and Unsettled Boundary
5 October – 4 december 2026
At University of Gloucestershire’s Elwes Gallery, and on the lawn in front of the Elwes building, Alice Sheppard Fidler presents two recent artworks: Showgirl (2026) and Unsettled Boundary (2024).
Although materially distinct, each installation explores the relationship between bodies and objects, proposing unruly negotiations between sculpture and the everyday spaces we inhabit. Embracing the capricious nature of the campus environment, Alice has assembled provisional forms with radical presence and a specificity of language that retain an essential lightness.
Alice Sheppard Fidler (b.1966, Birmingham, UK) is a contemporary artist based in Gloucestershire and London. Her multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and digital technologies, combining ready-made and found materials such as chairs, doors, wallpaper, and velvet with raw construction materials including timber, corrugated sheet, and brick. She is best known for her site-responsive approach, minimalist aesthetic, and the repurposing of the visual language of stage and set design.
Elwes lawn is situated outside the Elwes building, close to Main Reception and Elwes Gallery, w3w famous.arch.stream
opening times
The exhibition will be open Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm.
exhibition launch
Join us at Elwes Gallery on Wednesday 7 October, 5pm – 7pm. All welcome and refreshments will be provided.
exhibition symposium
Join us on Wednesday 25 November, 2pm – 5pm, for Becoming Strange, with Alice Sheppard Fidler and guest speakers, Prof Carol A. Taylor and Greig Burgoyne. Chaired by UoG curator, Sarah Bowden.
Professor Carol A. Taylor will take a number of lines of flight with Alice Sheppard Fidler’s artwork Showgirl. Informed by the feminist materialist premise of thing-power, which proposes that objects have agency and power, Prof Taylor will ‘follow the thingly scent’ (Bennett, 2010) of Showgirl’s materialities to become entangled with the object-body-space relations that it hails into being, aiming to attune to and resonate with Showgirl as in-situ and direct material engagement with the world (Barad 2007).
Greig Burgoyne will approach the two works in the exhibition as personas, ‘two spheres that didn’t know each other, brought together in their shared foreignness’ (Blanchot), situating the artworks within an improvised and expanding universe of references and theories, shifting configurations between showing and concealment.
Guest speakers:
Professor Carol A. Taylor works in the Department of Education, University of Bath. Her research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education utilizing transdisciplinary, posthumanist and feminist materialist theories and methodologies. Carol has contributed to over 100 publications. Her latest research involves walking as research praxis.
Greig Burgoyne is an artist, researcher, and writer exploring the paradoxes of visibility and invisible through live performance, film and installation. He studied at the Universität Für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna and The Royal College of Art, London. He is Subject Lead for BA Fine Art at UCA Canterbury, UK. He regularly presents papers at conferences, symposiums, writes for the Venice Biennale, Bloomsbury books, and exhibits extensively, primarily in Europe.
Please book to secure your place free-of-charge, or email [email protected].
