Alice Gardner-Bates

About the Artist

I was born in Houston, Texas to an American father and Welsh mother. I became disabled when I was eleven and withdrew into comic books for comfort. I received a BA in visual art from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2013. Drawing inspiration from Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Hans Bellmer, I work primarily in oil painting. I have now expanded my work into comics and illustration, and my work has been published in comics anthologies. All my work has a unifying concern with the representation of women in art and media.

Artist's Statement

I paint mutilated women wearing poignant expressions. They are a satire of sexual objectification and consumption that consciously interrupts the male gaze. It is inspired by the frustration, bordering on futility, of women’s efforts to define themselves within a intersecting systems of oppression. These paintings explore the fluidity of identity, and a person’s ability to change and reconstruct themselves in response to set systems. I integrate the literary notions of body horror, the uncanny and the abject into my work to understand the unfeminine and unexpressed violence in young women’s internal experiences. These are a catalog of women’s attempts to assert power and control over their own bodies.