Alice Quarterman is interested in alternative and expanded timekeeping and its relation to rhythm and experience. Often pieces act as records, visualisations, or ways of understanding time: like a kind of calendar, or anti-calendar. The work does not promise any particular outcome for either the audience or artist, but instead offers an invitation to explore the possibilities within different ways of being.
This exploration is informed by the sensory and subjective constructions of reality. The artist is interested in what it means to listen, and how this might then apply to other kinds of perceiving and acting. The liveness of sensory perception in turn feeds into the responsive and mindful timekeeping: a slippery framework that may encourage both a stepping into and out of time.
Quarterman draws on the tradition within this area to explore the personal potential of these ideas to promote expanded consciousness and healing. The work on this subject is open, inexhaustive and unauthoritative: concerned with exploration rather than instruction. It takes an approach which is both proudly self-indulgent and aligned with the experiential, personal relationship to time: a practice rooted in their own experience and grounded there through the use of to-hand, domestic or familiar materials and spaces.
Quarterman’s practice is marked by an idiosyncratic process which values experience and subjectivity as both motivation and methodology. Having been alternatively described as ‘doing whatever you ****ing fancy’, the qualities of awareness, responsiveness, acceptance and accommodation in this method are mirrored within the work itself.
