Alice Davies (b. 1997) is an English artist based in Oslo. Her practice explores and reconfigures relationships between clay, biological bodies and site-specific phenomena hidden within the landscape. For example, she investigates how magnetism interacts with water and rock formations, approaching these questions speculatively through sculpture and time-based media.
Her work engages material processes that reveal otherwise unseen properties, which she traces visually. Through this, she develops a playful, symbolic, and affective language that invites bodily and imaginative encounters with the environments shaped by these processes and materialities.
Davies’ artistic focus on ancient sites, recently the chalk landscapes of Wiltshire near her family home in southwest England, delves into the land as both an ancestor telling stories in forgotten tongues and as a kind of sublimity that can shift and change the senses.
For her exhibition at Galleri Box, Order of the Golden Carrot, Alice draws on visits to numerous bronze-age barrows (small man-made chalk mounds), whose meanings remain partially unknown. Through references to Victorian ideals of taste, domestic display and the era’s fascination with the supernatural and mesmerism, the works consider how beauty and order have been used to frame mystery. In the exhibition, the carrot becomes a symbol of knowledge just out of reach, suspended like empty scrolls or still life objects. Clay and chalk, present both in the barrows and in the works exhibited, quietly bear witness to our attempts to civilise and serve what cannot be fully known.