Discussion of ‘Holding Space’ Exhibition Sculptural Works

In January 2026 Alice Sheppard Fidler had two pieces of work in the group show ‘Holding Space’, in Bristol. In February, Alice and artist and access support worker Ruby Kester sat down to discuss them.

Once here, 2020 (Photo: Jo Hounsome)

Alice: I want to talk about these works in the architecture of the space and the way the two works came together. The work ‘Once here’ ended up going in an alcove, and was made in 2020. The piece ‘There, there’ I made in 2025, so it was interesting for me to put these two works in the same space together and see what they did.

Ruby: Did you feel like your two pieces were very separate in the show or did you get a sense of a relationship between the two of them?

Alice:  I hadn't anticipated the fact that there were five years between these works being made and that they are both made with two fundamental materials: one hard and one soft. So, they both have these strong similarities to them. The wood and the light are quite different, but the wood creates a firm boundary line and this white light is also quite a defined line. There's a sort of relationship with architecture - one that requires the corner and one that speaks of architecture through its materiality. 

Ruby: With ‘Once here’ the whole space - this threshold, this window or doorway into that vision - becomes part of the artwork. It actually frames it, which you don't get when it's outside of the archive. It extends the boundaries of the artwork.

Alice: I think that's interesting because I would also say that it controls the boundaries. I like using light and sound in my practice because both light and sound travel as far as they can until something stops them. I’m playing around with this notion of control as utter expansion, freedom, tension until it bounces off something. So, the other thing we've got going in both works is control. 

There, there, 2025 (Photo: Jo Hounsome)

Ruby: I’d say in being in the alcove it relates more to the sense of control that I see with the wood. For example, I might say that the light is the equivalent of the rapeseed byproduct and the alcove edges the equivalent of the wood in some ways. Because of the control and the lines, but also the way that the light could potentially spill out and the rapeseed byproduct, if you moved the wood, could also potentially spill out… 

Alice: With these two works having come together coincidentally we now have a lovely essential list of what happens in my practice. This control, this notion of construction and deconstruction…  then we've got this sense of place, time, presence and absence, going on.

This piece of paper in ‘Once here’ I took out of my residency in the old brewery in Nailsworth. I love this aspirational wallpaper that was in a working man's club, that someone’s deliberately violated with this act of violence, puncturing. What drove somebody to think that they could stub their cigarette out on this beautiful wallpaper? So, we've got this bucolic, aspirational beauty, and nature with the waving fields of rapeseed that’re utterly otherworldly. Then I'm controlling it, or it has been ruined. 

Ruby: Maybe it’s also a strange byproduct of human use, in that you were attracted to this wallpaper and it only exists in this way because a human interacted with it and burnt their cigarette up against it. It's being used by humans and discarded, and the byproduct of the rapeseed is also discarded. Humans take the good bit, freely picking and choosing the bits that they want and then just throwing away all the rest.

Alice: When you look at this work you know it's a found object and its speaks of another time. Just as with ‘There, there’ we know that the rapeseed is a living plant that’s now dead, so there's a history. It’s a double entendre of absence and presence where the thing that was done has created the hole that we're looking at now. 

‘There there’ is called that because of the patting that I did for patting down the straw, which is a comforting action.  But it's also from - and not coincidentally - Gloucestershire where I now live. I'm playing around with this idea of what we think is safe and secure. Always my work comes back to the great existential crisis of ‘do I exist’, ‘where am I’, in a playful, not too heavy way. 

The other thing that comes up in this work are the holes that are in the found wood, alluding to its past. The holes are similar to the cigarette holes. It's wood that has been functional. It had a reason and was purposeful, and the person sticking the cigarette into the wallpaper also had a purpose - but it wasn't functional, it was just playing around. This piece of wood would have been used for something, we just don't know what for and why they're even intervals. In the work they also act as indicators and pointers, because the holes run along the wooden structure and so your eye draws along them. 

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