Window Dressing

In Window Dressing, Alice Wormald presents a series of paintings that extend her practice of creating three-dimensional paper collages as source material. Attuned to the practice of tending, making and looking, the artist gathers pictures from homemaking, gardening and nature books, combining them with coloured paper and card to form layered collages. These constructions are cut, folded and built up in three dimensions, and carefully staged photographs of these arrangements become the source images for the paintings.
The works form fragmented window-like compositions, where curtains and planes of colour are intricately arranged with flaps and apertures that reveal scenes of flowers and gardens beyond. Layering, upending, covering and revealing, the curtains, rendered in detail or silhouette, act as thresholds between picture and viewer. Alluding to the use of drapery in 17th-century Dutch interior and trompe l’oeil paintings, the works present intimate scenes that both reference and unsettle the decorative traditions from which they are drawn. They suggest breaches in a wall that open onto concealed gardens — veiled spaces that remain partially inaccessible, holding a tension between revelation and mystery.