Alexis Zelda Stevens

In the catalogue to her show at ArtSway in the New Forest last year (2005), Alexis described the fact that she had become suspicious of the fact that even harrowing or gruesome 2D images painted on a canvas are easy to ignore or pass-by, because the viewer will always understand that what is depicted is an illusion.

Instead it became important to her to make art that exists in the same space as the viewer, invading their comfort-zone and confronting them head-on. It was this that drew her to making constructions, and in the last couple of years to large room-size installations that are exuberant, irrational and bold.

Typically featuring splashes of yellow, orange and pink, the colours in her work are often so artificially bright as to be psychedelic. In this sense it is very psychological and attuned to extremes of experience, in common with other artists of her generation such as Jim Lambie who have used kitsch as a vehicle for delivering a kind of perceptual or optical overload.

Despite other contemporary influences like Jessica Stockholder and Richard Tuttle, Alexis, having spent a number of years in Cornwall has not escaped the influence of the St Ives modernists. The parallels between her practice, as a form of abstract painting and that of someone like Peter Lanyon, are worth noting, particularly given his use of ordinary found objects, masonite and household paints.

Lanyon though was keen to keep his art rooted in the landscape. In fact to many contemporary artists his passionate attachment to Cornwall and its landscapes seems problematic and overly sentimental, linked though it may have been both to romanticism and a need to attach his practice to a recognised genre.

On one level therefore Alexis’ practice is unique in Cornwall. And yet on another Alexis shares with the St Ives modernists a staunch commitment to formal inventiveness and abstract values and a painterly understanding of form, materials and colour.

At the time of writing Alexis does not have her own website, but there is a lot on the web including a very good article published in the New York Arts Magazine http://nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3317&Itemid=207 

RW sept 2006