“My work changed focus after the birth of my daughter nearly two years ago, these works are all recent and deal with my concerns about womanhood. ‘I play with making strange the ultra familiar, and disrupting the unconscious stream of ideology through imagery in which we all swim. My processes are laborious and time-consuming, a labour-of-love.
Recent works have explored nostalgia and romance as vehicles for interrogating feminine tropes. A current obsession with Hollywood’s golden age was provoked by the process of making my short film Torture The Women (The China Cupid) 2013/14, composed of a series of scenes taken from Hollywood screen tests for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. These scenes are digitally re-drawn and re-animated, the text edited and spliced to explore the cultural and literary manipulations of woman as romantic object. The phrase ‘torture the women’ was used by Hitchcock when asked for his advice on how to make a thrilling movie; the film seeks to take and yet subvert his advice, using repetition and digital manipulation to isolate the actress and draw attention to the peculiarities of the script and by extension Du Maurier’s novel and the whole genre.
more about Alex…
Alex March is a London based artist originally from the North of England working with drawing, film, photography and painting to produce works which explore memory, representation and identity. March uses processes of editing, obscuring or physically removing areas of detail. This draws attention to the audience’ ability to empathise with the clichéd impulse to relive remembered moments and embrace notions of identity derived from personal objects, particularly photography. Laborious analogue and hand techniques are combined with digital technology to explore the object/image relationships of domestic archives, re-valuing personal items of ‘junk’ from the past to the status of artwork.
She is a founder member and director of ArtLacuna Space, an artist-led studio, project and gallery space in Clapham Junction, London. Open since May 2013, the space has hosted screenings, a mini-film festival,group exhibitions, talks, performances, experimental art projects, artist solo projects, workshops and much more. ArtLacuna has also devised a publication series, an online arts research platform and is home to nine working artists.
She graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2011 with a Masters in Fine Art. She featured in the Catlin Guide 2012, a guide to the 40 most promising UK graduates. She was shortlisted for the Jealous Graduate Print Prize 2011 and the Future Map 11 Prize. Previously she gained her BA in Visual Arts from the University of Buckinghamshire and studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art.
