These oil paintings investigate memory as a cognitive and semiotic process, not as fixed record, but as an active system of encoding, retrieval, and reconstruction.

I work through accumulation and erasure, building surfaces that mirror how memory operates: fragments layered and partially obscured, information degraded through iteration, meaning emerging from what persists rather than what was originally present.

Each painting functions as a site where stored experience undergoes transformation, where the act of remembering becomes inseparable from forgetting, and coherence emerges from incompleteness.

My training in calligraphy and typography informs an inquiry into the threshold between linguistic sign and visual mark. I'm interested in the moment a gesture loses its capacity to signify linguistically but retains semantic potential… where letterforms collapse into pure shape, yet continue to carry traces of their systematic origins.

These paintings operate as personal semiotic systems: marks that function as signs within a private code; gestural alphabets that resist external legibility while asserting their status as meaning-making structures.

Working at the intersection of memory studies, linguistics, and material practice, I'm drawn to how we construct meaning from fragmentary information. The paintings don't represent memory, they enact its processes: layering, obscuring, juxtaposing elements that were never temporally or spatially adjacent, creating new relationships through cognitive reorganisation rather than faithful documentation.

These works bring kinetic energy into domestic and commercial spaces. They are substantial enough to anchor a room, dynamic enough to energise it, and layered enough to reveal something new over time. The surfaces reveal and conceal marks, asking the viewer to return, to re-read, to discover what they missed.

Alice Edy is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia, working from her studio on Wurundjeri Land, Brunswick, Melbourne.

Alice holds an MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, a Masters degree in English Literature from the University of Cape Town (2016), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2010).

Born and raised in Johannesburg, Alice has exhibited in South Africa at Kalashnikovv Gallery (Johannesburg), Salon91 (Cape Town), and Nirox Sculpture Park (Maropeng), where she completed a month-long artist residency and presented at the "words" arts and literary festival (2016).

Since relocating to Australia in 2017, Alice has maintained a full-time creative studio practice, working as both a fine artist and commercial illustrator.