Alice Gale-Feeny

About

I am an artist and writer who makes performance, via dance, sculpture, video, and facilitation. I use scripts, objects and sites as ‘containers' for improvisational processes, considering how language, material forms and bodies (re)construct realities and build fictions.

I am interested in the emergent possibilities of working with the body. Particularly the ‘accumulation' of lived experience, and how this may ‘recalibrate' over time in different contexts, alongside changing bodies and voices. I develop frameworks with the people I work with, often co-writing scripts, and using such texts to guide aesthetic decisions.   

I consider the many ways in which the verbal and the 'material' of the body, intra-act. In this way, New Materialist and Posthumanist perspectives, feminist writing, and somatic movement practices, provide a context to be in conversation with, in the process of making such work.

Solo exhibitions and performances include: Seventeen, for Performance Exchange curated by Rose LeJeune, London (2021), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017), Nottingham Castle and Museum (2016-17), Space One, Seoul (2015) and Two Queens, Leicester (2014).

Selected residencies include: Hypha Studios, London (2022), Glasshouse, New Art Gallery Walsall (2017); Béton Caverne, Brittany (2017).

In 2021 I graduated with an MFA in Creative Practice Dance Professional Practice from Trinity Laban and Independent Dance, London. I was awarded a Gill Clarke Bursary and Leverhulme Scholarship.

The late-physicist David Bohm's writing 'On Dialogue' informed a facilitation practice in which I organised public conversation events using a 'fishbowl conversation' format including: 'How to Arrange Ourselves', Mansions of the Future, Lincoln (2019); 'Collectivism', co-curated residency, Haarlem Artspace, Wirkswirth (2019); 'In Circles, Around Tables', Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018) and '2-Way Street', Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017). 

I am part of a project of students and staff built on values of equity, care, non-hierarchical learning and anti-racism entitled A Particular Reality. 

Academic responsibilities

0.5 Senior Lecturer, Fine Art

Qualifications

  • MFA Creative Practice: Dance Professional Practice, Trinity Laban / Independent Dance, London
  • Ba (Hons) Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
  • Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Teaching and learning

I am Module Leader for L4 Professional Practice (FA4007) and a personal tutor across L4 and L6. I feed into the Professional Skills lecture programme and I co-devise workshops and skills-based sessions. I have particular interests and experience in making solo and group performance (incorporating movement, improvisation, voice, writing, sound and video) as well as bringing skills in video editing, curation and critical thinking.

Through my experience living and working as an artist, writer, performer, and curator, I bring 11 years experience to teaching. I have shown work nationally and internationally and have been part of artist-led spaces as well as sharing work in museums, galleries and festivals. I am committed to the idea that there is not one Art World and that Art Worlds can be built with collectivity, collaboration and mutual support. I am also interested in where the intersections between Fine Art / Dance / Performance / Poetry worlds cross. 

I have a hands on approach to my teaching and I am committed to opening up dialogues with students.Through my involvement in A Particular Reality, an inter-institutional collective of students and staff, I seek to  embed values such as care, equity, non-hierarchical learning and anti-racism in my teaching as much as I can, and see teaching as a dialogical process.

I believe that challenging dominant forms of knowledge is one way of opening up conversations around agency and allows students to have a critical engagement with the world. I am interested in how agency could be found by an artist, on their own terms. 

Undergraduate courses taught

Research

My research is grounded in performance, drawing from my background in Fine Art (Ba Hons) and Dance (MFA). I have developed a methodology that brings writing and performance-making together through embodied approaches.  Somatic investigations, use of found objects and reading aloud are used as methods with the aim of creating scripts and performances that integrate the lived experiences of those engaged with the practice.

I am particularly interested in New Materialism and Posthumanism as ways of approaching performance and collaborative processes. I also draw from Auto-theoretical writing and queer feminist poetry.

Recent activities include:

'The Iridescent Creature', a performance reading for the conference 'on not knowing: how artists teach' at Glasgow School of Art (2023). Presented within 'Distracted Pedagogy: activating attentional dispersal' convened by Moyra Derby and Flora Parrott. 

The book chapter 'The Iridescent Creature: notes for performing web-cam based investigations' co-authored alongside JJ Chan and Andrea Stokes, will be included in the volume  'Diffracting New Materialisms: Emerging Methods in Artistic Research' edited by JJ Chan and Annouchka Bayley published by Palgrave Macmillan. 

My writing will be published by JOAN in an anthology of writing titled 'Dance across the carpeted floor, please' in February 2024 with a launch and reading at Camden Arts Centre on February 15th, 2024.

Leadership and management

Module Leader for FA4007 Professional Skills

Videos of my work

Social media

Instagram