Alice Wormald
Window Dressing
20 September - 1 November 2025

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.

Alice Wormald completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2011. She has held six solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, as well as solo exhibitions at Gallery 9, Linden New Art, Blindside and Shifted. Her work has been exhibited in Synthetica, a NETS touring exhibition at Wangaratta Art Gallery, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Counihan Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. She has also been included in exhibitions including Accession, Bundoora Homestead (2018), Analogue Art in a Digital World, RMIT Art Gallery (2018), Gardening is not a Rational Act at c3 Contemporary Art Space (2017), Visiting Painting at Horsham Regional Art Gallery (2016), Imagined Worlds, Town Hall Gallery (2016) and Vertigo, an Asialink touring exhibition at Galeri Soemardja, Bandung, Indonesia, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei, Taiwan and POSCO Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2014). Other group exhibitions include Sydney Contemporary, Spring 1883 Art Fair (Sydney 2017 and 2015, Melbourne 2020, 2018, 2016 and 2014) and New Horizons at Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale (2013).

Wormald is the winner of the 2022 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize and the 2022 Grace Cossington Smith Early Career Award. She has also been a finalist in the Bayside Art Prize (2020, 2017), Darebin Art Prize (2017, 2015), Bruny Island Art Prize (2016), City of Albany Art Prize (2015), Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2018 and 2014), the John Leslie Art Prize (2016, 2014 – Highly Commended, 2012), the Macquarie Group Prize for Emerging Artists (2013), and the Banyule City Prize for Works on Paper (2013).

Her work is held in the ACU, Artbank, Bayside Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Darebin City Council, Macquarie Group, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Fiona Myer, Artisit and Joyce Nissan Collections.