Alicia Proudfoot | Breath Scaling

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Alicia Proudfoot, “Disarticulation,” 2024

foldable light switch covers (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: Friday July 26th, 7 -10 pm

Breath Scaling is an exhibition of miniature sculptures and experimental mixed media works by Alicia Proudfoot – an Edmonton-based interdisciplinary artist – that charts the artist’s asthmatic body as arduous terrain. The project is the direct result of the Proudfoot’s continued exploration of topographic notation in sculpture and installation that thematically extends the recognition of all bodies as terrain.  Experimentation is valuable to Alicia Proudfoot as she explores humour’s role through her somatic archive on illness.

Breath Scaling – Proudfoot’s most recent project – traverses a difficult line between humour and severity that is so nuanced a guide was invited to lead the expedition report. The artist called her The Inventor –a persona Proudfoot embodies for behind the scenes research in her art practice. Rarely does The Inventor indulge with finished work, but she is exuberant by nature and wickedly clever in doling out absurd, almost backhanded solutions for better respiration. She couldn’t resist an exhibition featuring her field notes, trials, and designs compiled while scaling Alicia’s ribs like mountains.

Many of the featured work in the exhibition project include foldable mountain maquettes made from metal light switch covers, mixed media prints of cartographic notation, selected visual diary entries, and the very balloons that The Inventor climbed with to celebrate a successful summit. Installed throughout the exhibition are accessibility handles for those viewers who wish to stretch and bend for optimal viewing of each work and make an extreme sport out of empathy. Upon this somatic survey Alicia Proudfoot hopes to inspire deeper conversations that reassess our perception of heroism, adventure, and the habitual oversimplification to conflate illness with identity.

Artist’s Biography

Alicia Proudfoot is an interdisciplinary artist based in Edmonton, who incorporates industrial process and technology into her projects. She delights in modifying her formal training in sculpture, harp, sound composition, and performance to engage people. Experimentation is valuable to her as she explores humour’s role through her somatic archive on illness. Alicia Proudfoot holds a BFA degree with Honours (2016) from the University of Alberta in Edmonton and an MFA degree (2019) from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Her work thrives alongside community engagement. Alicia has a commission with Hinton’s Performing Arts Venue of a kinetic sculpture, and she has participated locally in several visual arts festivals, including New Music Edmonton, The WORKS, Silver Skate Festival, and Kaleido Family Arts Festival, to name just a few community-based projects. From elementary classrooms and universities to penitentiaries and palliative care units, her passion to teach has fostered strong relationships with art.

Alicia Proudfoot has had some international opportunities through an internship at Franconia Sculpture Park and an art residency with the Digital Stone Project in Italy where she made a digital sculpture that was then robotically carved out of marble. Currently, Alicia is a visiting academic for the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Artist’s Statement

The body is the thematic root of my art practice. A sick body, in my case an asthmatic body, creates friction with society’s mandates of idealized productivity, strength, and sustainable health. I critique these rigid qualifications through sensational design.

There is a thingness to my actions. I am enamored with the “vital materiality”, described by political theorist Jane Bennet, that surges under the skin of human and non-human. To channel this energy, I have reinterpreted my body as many entertaining things like a three-part musical Ode for my medical inhalers, a polyp covered marble yoyo, metal party decorations, and an enlarged steel bouquet of oil filter flowers that glow and cough through implanted speakers. As things, they have power to establish a sense of joy toward the necessary labour for self-care. Currently, I am exploring topographic notation in sculpture and installation that thematically extends the recognition of all bodies as terrain. Researching Crip theory and disability arts has led me down a path of how day-to-day health regimens act as a different speed of sustainability. Recovery time of any body is unique, and I am exploring it through a broader narrative of time in the imperceptible degradation of land body erosion or the fading echo of a musical instrument. By traversing this narrative an open conversation about the overlap between health, environment, and time can occur.