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| Alice Mumford b.1965 |
Born: Columbia
Studied: Falmouth College of Art 1995, Camberwell School of Art 1984-1987, Southwark College of Art and Design 1982-1984, Dartington Hall 1979-1982
Teaches life drawing and painting at St. Ives School of Painting 2001-
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One person exhibitions:
2011
'Taste It', Belgrave St Ives
2008
'Jumpy Yellow', Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn
2007
'Big Family - Still Life', Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
2006
Featured Artist, Caroline Wiseman, London
Recent Work, The Great Atlantic Map Works, Falmouth
2005
Belgrave Gallery, London
'Summer and Autumn', Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn
2004
Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn
2003
'Intimate Interiors & Favourite Objects', Julian Lax, London
2001
Cobra and Bellamy, London
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Selected mixed exhibitions:
2011
Belgrave St Ives, St Ives
Stoneman Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall
2010
Belgrave St Ives, St Ives
2009
'Three Representational Painters', Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
2008
'Cornish Painting - A Family Quartert', Piers Feetham Gallery, London
Josie Eastwood Fine Art, Winchester
2007
'St. Ives - Selected Artists', Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
'A Postcard From St Ives', Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
Badcocks at Easter, Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn
2006
New English Art Club Annual Open Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London
'The Cornish Connection', Belgrave Gallery London
'Places and Spaces', Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
Christmas Exhibition, Belgrave Gallery St. Ives
2005
'From St. Ives To Newlyn', Caroline Wiseman, London
'Inner Light', The Great Atlantic Map Works, St. Just
Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn
2004
The New English Art Club Annual Open Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
'St. Ives, The Human Figure and Landscape', Julian Lax, London
2003
'Winter Miscellany', Julian Lax, London
Rainyday Gallery, Penzance
2002
Aldborough Festival, Piers Feetham Gallery
Rainyday Gallery, Penzance
2001
Cobra and Bellamy, London
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Introduction to 'Big family - Still LIfe' Exhibition Catalogue:
Alice Mumford is fast becoming a pre-eminent still life painter with a proven market for her exquisitely nuanced and impressionistically modelled light-filled interiors. These are inhabited with posed or randomly cluttered tabletops behind which lie windows onto the outside world. The interface between domestic and exterior becomes, in her own words, "an analogy for our inner and outer worlds". This posits an introspective and pantheistic mood that gives depth, empathy and heightened appreciation to the most ordinary and commonly encountered scenarios.
Compositions like 'Flowers on the Studio Table' and 'The Yellow Jug', with their beautifully pitched tonality, churned painterliness and relaxed but sensitised paint handling, also contain a human drama in absentia. Richard Demarco's estimation that they symbolise the presence of human beings points not only to the obvious social functionalism of teapot, flower vase, jug, beaker or fruit bowl, but to the fact that for this artist such reassuringly familiar objects contain what she again describes as "something of the warmth of the family". This exhibition's title 'Still Life - Big Family' refers obliquely to her large, old and rooted Cornish family. Yet her brand of painting eschews social narrative and psychological disruption for a beautiful quietism where the play of light on silverware, lustrous ceramic, patterned tablecloth or wallpaper imparts a soulful mood of self-containment, restful reverie and repose from the hustle and bustle of human interaction.
Mumford's heritage is therefore rich on the social and cultural front; as one of the last Camberwell students during the 1980s Mumford showed respect for the grand painting tradition, looking beyond the Euston Road, Sickert and the English impressionists to the great Dutch and Italian traditions of still life. She negotiated these traditions not through rhetoric, strident gesture or bogus cutting edge iconoclasm but rather through an intimacy with the language of paint perceived as more than a mere descriptive vehicle. No wonder a former tutor Anthony Eyton told Mumford that they had "quite a lot in common". And other former tutors like Sargy Mann and Phil Amey would attest to the fact that Camberwell's atmosphere of seriousness about painting had rubbed off on her.
A certain humility accompanies Mumford's approach in which the futile cult of the new is sidelined for a constant and refreshing re-invention of the fundamental and timeless language of painting. Like Morandi, Vuillard, Gwen John and the Intimistes, Alice Mumford is an artist for all seasons who can animate an ordinary corner of a room with the full presence of the here and now.
Peter Davies, October 2007
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