Alice Instone

• Born: 4 June 1975 (age 35), Pembury, Kent, United Kingdom
• Nationality: British
• Occupation: Artist
• Years active : 2005-present

Alice Instone (born June 4, 1975) is a London based English artist. She makes paintings concerned with gender and power and frequently depicts influential or well known public figures. She started working as an artist in 2005.

Early life and career

Brought up in East Sussex she studied English at Kings College, University of London and took part of her degree in History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She worked as a secondary school teacher and for the advertising agencies WCRS and J Walter Thompson before becoming an artist in 2005.

Fine art career

Instone’s first solo show in 2008, 21 21, depicted 21 powerful contemporary women. The women who sat for the artist included Annie Lennox who wrote an essay for the catalogue, Cherie Blair, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, Baroness Greenfield, Fiona Bruce, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Anya Hindmarch and Shami Chakrabarti CBE. The works were exhibited at The House of Commons, The Royal Society of Arts and Ernst & Young’s headquarters. In February 2010 Northampton Museum put on a solo show of her work entitled Interview with a Shoe, a collection of portraits of people through their favourite shoes that was initially shown at BBB Gallery, Shoreditch, including Baron Woolf, Bianca Jagger, Elle Macpherson, Sir Peter Blake and Beverley Knight. Jennie Murray interviewed her about the exhibition for Radio 4 Woman’s Hour in May 2009.

Her most recent paintings, titled The House of the Fallen Woman portray infamous women from history, playing on the theme of notoriety by again using several famous or well known sitters such as Emilia Fox as Marie Antoinette, India Knight as Catherine de Medici, mother and daughter Annie and Lola Lennox as Elizabeth I and Helen of Troy, mother and daughter Cherie and Kathryn Blair as Eleanor of Acquitaine and Kathryn Swynford, Lorraine Candy as Lucretia Borgia, Caitlin Moran as Kitty Fisher, Alice Temperley as Mata Hari, Laura Bailey as Guinevere, Emma Freud as Emma Hamilton, Jo Wood as Madam de Pompadour, Pattie Boyd as Boudica, Anita Zabludowicz as Lettice Knollys and Claudia Winkleman as Theda Bara.

Instone’s large scale paintings are characterised by dripping paint, intense light and dark and focus on the sitter to the almost complete exclusion of everything else. Her tiny Victoriana-style miniatures use recycled frames and are painted on glass.

Solo exhibitions

• 2007 Royal Society of Arts, London
• 2008 Ernst and Young headquarters, London
• 2008 The House of Commons, London
• 2009 BBB Gallery, London
• 2010 Northampton Museum, Northampton
• 2010 The House of St Barnabas, London

Collections

• Annie Lennox
• Tony and Cherie Blair
• Evelyn Glennie Foundation
• British Medical Association
• Northampton Museum
• Baroness Kennedy QC,
• Val Gooding CBE,
• Dianne Thompson CBE,
• Cilla Snowball CBE,
• The Hindmarch family
• Richard O’Brien
• Private Collections in USA, France, South America and UK

Personal life

Instone married Hugh Billett at Chelsea Register Office in 2002, and has one daughter (born 2008)

References

• The House of the Fallen Woman on the offical Annie Lennox Blog
• BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Interview
• Fashion meets art for stylish exhibition opening in Northampton Museum
• Irish Independent
• Vogue
• Fantastic Toe
• Liverpool Daily Post

External links

• Alice Instone official website