Alice Sherlock: The Great Chip Pan Fire

About the artist

Alice Sherlock is a London-based artist whose work functions as a visual filter for the unreliable, romanticised nature of memory. A 2022 graduate of the Glasgow School of Art’s Masters programme, Sherlock bridges the gap between fine art and theatre to explore how familial histories are preserved and distorted. Her practice is built on aural verbatim storytelling, recorded conversations that she translates into a visual language. Rather than documenting these histories with clinical accuracy, she leans into the "bittersweet" distortions of nostalgia, turning mundane childhood anecdotes into something surreal.

The imagery centres on the familiar furniture of the domestic everyday: a weathered fence post, a kitchen table, or a heavy chair. By working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, she adjusts the volume of the narrative. A delicate etched line might stand in for a fading, half-forgotten detail, while a thick, impulsive brushstroke on canvas mimics the way a story grows more exaggerated with every retelling. There is a deliberate rejection of the precious here; Sherlock embraces humour and a sense of play, allowing her work to drift into the uncanny through shifted perspectives and imagined worlds.

Her process is one of repeated translation. Sherlock sketches while listening to verbatim recordings, then draws again from those initial sketches, moving further away from the source material until the original memory is successfully "fantasised." These motifs reappear across her work like recurring characters. Since her time studying Meisner technique and sculpture at SUNY Binghamton, Sherlock has exhibited extensively across the UK, including the Hidden Door Arts Festival in Edinburgh and various shows at The Alchemy Experiment in Glasgow. Represented by ArtPistol, her work continues to investigate how the mundane becomes extraordinary once filtered through the subjective lens of the retold story.