Why do you need to climb the mountain

Shifting mercurially across registers of figuration, landscape, and abstraction, Alice Neave’s paintings are expressive manifestations of imaginal environments. Her haptic works constitute an experiential engagement with the transformational material properties of paint and canvas, revelling in a productive tension between the poetic and the visceral. Neave’s fictional realms are born from emotions as well as a hazy sense of a world beyond that which we see in our everyday perceptions. Populated by elements that percolate in from the artist’s subconscious or emerge from the paint during the process, nebulous scenes and narratives unfold like dreams through an internal and unidentifiable logic. This creative world-building results in painterly expanses that are fragile and delicate, in which spatiality is difficult to pin down. There is a strand of childlike naivety running through her oeuvre, both in her use of colour and in the sparsely picked out elements of figuration. Some works are populated by hazy figures that might be either human or animal, suggesting states of shapeshifting or metamorphosis. These qualities imbue Neave’s paintings with a ghostly lightness, as half-told narratives echo hauntingly across the picture plane.