Self-discovery
“I think it’s always a process of self-discovery,” Alice says when Take Two asks her about what she has learned from her long career, “It continues. And that’s what’s wonderful about being creative. That’s a testament to constantly being your own worst critic because what you hold in your head becomes completely different when you advocate it. I think what I have learned is because my art has taken many months to make very often, and I can’t see what I’m doing; a lot of the process is invisible up to a point because it’s squashed into the machine or it’s upside down or what I’m seeing in front of myself is very tiny or in reverse.
So I’ve learned to be patient and allow that time to be constructive, but I also think that because I can’t see what I’m doing, I’ve learned to really look deeply and look and see because sometimes we look, but we don’t see.”
Odyssey
Alice’s love of stories has featured heavily in her art and never more perhaps than in her piece, Odyssey, “I’ve always loved the classic kind of traditional tales of wisdom and truths,” she says, “they are ways of encountering our own contemporary stories because life repeats. There are adversities and adventures and stories of love and loss.”
For Odyssey, Alice drew on one of the earliest stories in the Western tradition, “I have family in Greece,” she says, “and I’ve spent many long periods in Greece. So I feel that Greece is sort of part of my personal history. And this is based on the story, the story of Odysseus, Homer’s Odyssey, which, of course, is about the epic tale of Odysseus, who goes to help rescue Helen of Troy with the other kings of Greece, his story to return home to Ithaca to his faithful wife, Penelope.
So the Odyssey is about those years of return and his adventures on the way, so it’s about self-discovery. It’s about Penelope’s faithfulness and it’s about beliefs. Within it, it has the sort of universal themes about life and belonging and self to self-renewal.
I’ve used references to some of the stories within stories in the epic poem. But I’ve also put my own story within it. So, for example, there are two goddesses in the novel, Calypso and Circe, and as goddesses, they long for human love. We all long to be loved, and we all long to be appreciated, so I put that figure as the central figure in the piece because I was divorcing at the time. So placing myself at the centre of this idea meant I’m on my journey.”