How would you define your work in three words?

This is a difficult question… maybe ‘Observed and constructed moments.’

What medium do you mainly work with and why?

I mainly work with distemper. The reasons are partly because of how it looks, it has a kind of matt, crystalline texture I really like. I also like the control you get over the colours when using raw pigments. It’s a bit more like painting in watercolour than in oils.

I use rabbit-skin glue as a binder for my pigments. I like that it is a non-toxic material that can be washed up with water. I do feel sorry for the rabbits, but to me, it feels cleaner and greener than oils or acrylics. I use the glue for collaging canvas and other fabrics onto the canvas.

I like the process of making the distemper: you have to heat the glue all the time (when cool, it is a sort of jelly), and this sort of slows me down and forces me to pause from time to time, as I tend to overwork things.

Where do you find most inspiration for your work?

I work mainly from observational drawings – they are of my friends and family, the people and places I know the best. In that way, my inspiration really comes from my life and the world around me. This being said, everything I am reading and looking at also feeds in, for example, recently I’ve been enjoying learning about the nature of time and matter according to physics, and I have been thinking a lot about the book ‘Like’ by Ali Smith.

You can say, ‘this is what is happening right now, ’ but the moment has already gone. Diaries are often places where the writer can try to pin down moments and think and reflect on what is going on around them.

I think of my work as very diaristic in this way, I am trying to capture moments, people and places, in an attempt to make time stand still so that I can think. By capturing them on the canvas, I want to be able to pause and look at my subjects with great attention. Capturing my subjects on canvas allows me to pause and look at them with greater attention.

Can you remember the first work of art that you created? What was it, and why was it so memorable?

I don’t know if I can remember the first work of art I created. I mean, I was always drawing and painting and making things as a child, but do those count as works of art?

I think for me, one of the most important paintings I’ve made is a painting based on drawings of my grandmother on her deathbed (‘The Garden’, 102 x 72 cm, distemper, gesso and oil on canvas, 2022). It was a painting where I worked out lots of things about how I wanted to paint, and although I felt strange about exhibiting it, it also felt completely necessary to paint it. It also started an ongoing interest in gardens and plants.

Take us through your working process

‘Making Eggs In The Morning’, 2024. Distemper and collaged canvas on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.

This is a painting I did of my boyfriend cooking eggs one morning, which started, like most of my work, with some drawings.

I worked from the drawings to make a series of black and white ink studies. Sometimes I make watercolours as studies, but for this one, I just used black ink. My drawings are usually just in pencil. For me, I think it’s good working from something black and white, because then I can really go crazy with the colour when I am painting.

After the ink studies, I started to paint on a canvas. I start my canvases by just painting them in random colours, just enjoying the way the colours work together, and I do that before deciding what I will paint on each canvas.

When working on the canvas, it’s hard to say what happens. I draw with the brush, and I also collage on shapes. I think I am hoping to be surprised. I want the collage to disrupt the image; I like that its physical quality distorts the picture plane. It can look kind of temporary, as if it could be moved or removed, and I like that too because it alludes to what I’m always thinking about, which is the way an image is constructed, and the construction is quite unstable, like our memories. While painting this work, I was also thinking about eggs and fertility, the idea of pregnancy and the imagery of ultrasounds.

‘For Making Eggs In The Morning’, I originally started on a larger canvas, but after working on it for a few weeks, I decided it felt too stiff and heavy. I had lost the clarity and lightness of the colour, so I started again on a smaller scale. Things changed and moved around, for example, the figure in the bottom right corner wasn’t in any of the drawings or studies, nor on the original painting. In a way, the first painting was a waste of time, but in another way, I don’t know, if I would have been able to make this one without painting the first one.

What did it mean to you to win the 2023 ACS x City & Guilds of London Art School Undergraduate Prize?

It really meant so much. I was so shocked when they read it out that I could hardly make my legs move. Obviously, you are hoping and hoping to win a prize but you never really believe you will win it. I think the validation of winning it gave me a real confidence boost.

It has been an especially busy one, as I exhibited with The Violet Hour, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, The Platform in Antwerp and EY Gallery in China and I had duo shows at Weald Contemporary in May and Soho Revue in November. I don’t know if I would have been able to do all those things without the time that the prize money gifted me, so I am incredibly grateful.

How did you use the prize money?

I used the prize money to pay for my studio in North Greenwich over the past year. I used the rest of the funds to pay for materials, such as stretcher bars and pigments.

What do you have coming up over the next year?

I have a few exciting things in the pipeline, including a residency in America in May and hopefully a show in London later in the year… let’s see!

To view more works by Alice Macdonald’s, visit her website here.