Carrier BagsInformation

Alis is an artist, educator and PhD candidate based in Birmingham, interested in networks both digital and cultural, infrastructural, and metaphorical. Her research is rooted in ecology, storytelling, craft and technology.

The research project she is currently undertaking imagines the internet as a landscape with ecological systems, as a way to diagnose its health. The project questions whether the soil of the internet is sick, adopting a fiction-as-method art practice to ask how ecological thinking can help create a vital, life-sustaining future ‘in-terra-net.’

B. 1989 Bristol
alisoldfield@hotmail.co.uk

Education

2022 – 2027

Practice-based PhD at Northumbria University as Part of the Cultural Negotiation of Science Research group under the supervision of Christine Borland and Fiona Crisp.

2013 – 2015

Royal College of Art London

MA Fine Art Photography

2008 – 2011

University of Wales, Newport

BA Documentary Photography (First class honours)

Exhibitions and Residencies

12/2023

Cosmic Modelling, Exhibition

Vivid Projects Birmingham

11/2023

CarryingThe Craft: Making Conversations

Institutional Fieldworking: CNoS @10 was a three-week series of exhibitions and events celebrating the tenth anniversary of Northumbria University’s Cultural Negotiation of Science Research Group (CNoS).

11/2023

Cosmotechnics, Manchester Contemporary

at the Manchester Art Fair

09/2023

Watershed, Exhibition

CARAD Rhayader

Marking the end of the decade long residency program at Elan Valley Wales and the ten artists who’ve been a part of its history.

09/2022

The Idea of a City, Artlicks Launch Exhibition

Recent Activity, Birmingham

08/2021
- 08/2022

Elan Valley Residency

Funded by Arts Council Wales & TheNational Lottery and in Partnership with Dwr Cymru Welsh Water.

10/2022

Cut Copy Remix, Exhibition

Vivid Projects

Work commissioned by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Black Hole Club(Vivid Projects) to respond to the newly launched Open Image Archive

01/2019

Staff Show, Exhibition

Birmingham School of Art

08/2016

Summer Exhibition

Anise Gallery, Shad Thames London

06/2016

Show RCA, Exhibition

Battersea, London

10/2014

The State of Things, Co-curated project; performances, screenings & talks

Dyson Gallery, Battersea, London

08/2014

WHAT WAS, Exhibition

Skellefteå City Hall, Sweden. European Capital of Culture Program

08/2014

TomaRun, Residency

Burtrask, Sweden

07/2014

Agitart Festival, Exhibition

Figueres, Spain

06/2014

Non-Knower, Exhibition

The Library Space, London

02/2014

RCA Secret, Exhibition

Royal College of Art

07/2011

GRWP, Exhibition

SW1 Gallery, London

Publications

06/2024

Makings Journal – Gentle Gestures: Contexts, Spaces and Approaches beyond the Academy

Studio Submission of a Podcast with Christine Borland exploring craft knowledge, storytelling and soundscape as carrier bags to pass on knowledge only accessible through the doing, through the craft.

09-11/2023

Heliotrope Journal

Part of the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary
A three-part text that explores the metaphor underpinning the PhD research, one that sees the internet as landscape (a mesh, then terrain, then topology) with parallel problems of monoculture, industrial agriculture and invasive capitalism. It also imagines data as water within this ‘in-terra-net’; thinking about data flow, data storage in clouds etc. and looks to histories of water management, control and colonialism. Finally, it proposes a look to panthology and the electrical theologians as a way of imbuing this internet landscape with divinity in order to approach it with reverence and awe and not as a resource to consume or as dominion to tame.

09/2022  

Art Licks, Issue 28: The Idea of a City

Interviewing Sophia Niazi

07/2017  

Laugh Magazine, Issue 01

Featured Artist

05/2015  

Exit Strategies, BlackDog Publishing

Co-Edited & Featured Artist

Autumn 2014

Eros Journal, Issue 5, Deal Vol.1

Featured Artist