STATEMENT

Currently my work is primarily figural, mainly anthropomorphic sculptures of animals that I use as engines to create parallels between issues that concern humanity and social justice. It’s also riddled with projections of archives, plant photography, and pottery. One constant thread is that of research and investigatory processes. I make work in order to sort through my thoughts and draw conclusions about things that perplex me. I form hypotheses, then the process of making and creating becomes akin to conducting experiments in search of proving or disproving these hypotheses.

My life, thus far, has been transient. I grew up in no particular community, in five different houses, with dozens of changing neighbors. I now spend most of my year in West Philadelphia, in a residential neighborhood, but even so I spend a few months every year uprooting my routine to go trot around different places, like Upstate New York, and work with kids in an intentional communities (summer camp). My family is beautiful and kind, but even still it ebbs and flows with political context, birth, death, death, DEATH, and whatever else drastically changes it (death). My beliefs are fairly concrete, in a way that hits on things big and small, like a marble in a massive hollow icosahedron* labeled “I CARE ABOUT EVERYTHING” rolling down a hill, each face of the icosahedron labeled with a different thing I care about, ranging from practices of collective care to food as protest to mother earth to my grandma and my mom and my dad and my (dead) cat and my new alive cat, to the classist implications of enforcing grammar to prioritizing kindness and then humor.

That’s how I find my hypotheses. Wherever the marble hits, if it rests a little, a concept tends to form (or, unconventionally, a metaphor that I can later rhetoricalize into a concept, the way that I just rhetoricalized “rhetoricalize” into a word...). Sometimes it passes, the marble hits elsewhere, and sometimes I have everything I need in front of me to execute it. That idea grows and possesses me and I begin my investigation. During my making, I start to process my experiences through the lens of my concept, and I keep working until I resolve my concept, and I resolve my art. 

BIO

Alice Hospitel lives in Philadelphia. They were born in Uccle, Belgium, and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio at the age of six. They have a B.A. in Visual Studies and a B.S. in Human Development and Community Engagement, with a certificate in Community Arts Practices, and a concentration in ceramics. They work as a teaching artist for Claymobile during the school year and as a camp counselor at Camp Stomping Ground during the summer.