The Approach in London is showcasing an exhibition titled ‘Body Conscious’ by artist Alice Channer until April 17th. The theme of the work for her second solo show for The Approach focuses on the human body and what it means to wear animal print fabrics. Although the human body is never physically represented in the exhibition, Channer’s ideas are portrayed in pleated and printed fabrics, cigarettes, made-to-measure sculptures and installations. Her work tries to show the new advances in technology for the artist and fashion designer, and how this has changed the fabric which sparks contact with our skin:
“Large-scale hanging fabric works, Tight Skin use a digital printing process to create stretched images of clothing prints taken from the bodies of amphibians. The works were made using a stretch snake print Primark vest and a stretch lizard print Maxi-Skirt. These pieces of clothing were then photocopied, scanned, stretched, digitally manipulated and digitally printed onto soft, vulnerable, glamorous Satin. The digitally printed fabric in these works looks to the way in which fashion designers have recently used this technique to bring technology very close to the body.
All the works in Body Conscious entail a similar negotiation between the artist’s human body and the technological and industrial processes used to produce them. The width of Tight Skin, for example, is determined both by the limitations of the digital printer used to print them, the measurements of the fabric, and the dimensions of human clothing. The height of Slip is decided both by the length of the rollers used to curve the steel, and the height of the artists standing body. Made from stainless steel, in some ways these works curve like fabric, but they also retain the solid quality of metal, curving and reflecting in unexpected ways. Long coloured lengths of elastic stretch around the metal surface as if dressing the body of the sculpture. As with all Channer’s works the sense of place around the works and the way your own body navigates them is as important as the space the works occupy.”
