Alexis’ practice encompasses installations of various scales with sculptural and pictorial elements; and dance. She is concerned with making plastic the non-verbal part of our communication and interactions. Foregrounding the physical in our experiences to make ‘what situations feel like to touch’. The work is poetic, tactile and connected to the expressing visceral body. Body is referred to indirectly through poetic abstractions of body-like materials; cultural abstractions like gestures; and ubiquitous experiences of day to day physicality like getting up from sitting on grass with its imprint on the back of your legs; or the inner tension of supressing a whole story of gestures with one unreadable blank expression. Collage is the through-line: she improvises or finds elements and collages them together into images, installations or performances. Alexis’ visual language weaves relationships between real/artificial and plays with materiality and scale. Performance works provide an exploration of states of being, recently the failed momentum of loss and mourning; and an extended period of boredom. Both strands inform each other and she is interested in theories that put the body centre stage over language as a structural element: Brian Massumi and Eve Sedgewick; Affect Theory; Visceral Theory, and before that Julia Kristeva and Helen Cixous. Also in psychology, especially the writings of Darrian Leader (What is Madness; The New Black) along with popular psychology books.
