Award-winning contemporary artist Alice Sheppard Fidler is showcasing two artworks in a free public exhibition at University of Gloucestershire’s Park Campus in Cheltenham.
The Gloucestershire-based artist was the recipient of The Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors (2023) and the CAS Emerging Sculpture Award (2023).
Sheppard Fidler’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and digital technologies, combining ready-made and found materials such as chairs, doors, wallpaper, and velvet with raw construction materials including timber, corrugated sheet, and brick.
The exhibition at Park Campus features Showgirl (2026) and Unsettled Boundary (2024) and is being staged at the University’s Elwes Gallery and on the lawn in front of the Elwes Building until 4 December 2026.
As part of the exhibition there will be a symposium, entitled Becoming Strange, on 25 November (2pm to 5pm). The symposium will include a question-and-answer session with Alice Sheppard Fidler and guest speakers, Professor Carol Taylor (University of Bath) and Greig Burgoyne (University of Creative Arts) chaired by the Curator of the Elwes Gallery, Sarah Bowden. The symposium is free to attend, but places must reserved in advance.
Sarah Bowden said: “Although materially distinct, both the artworks, Showgirl (2026) and Unsettled Boundary (2024), explore the relationship between bodies and objects.
“The two artworks are proposing unruly negotiations between sculpture and the everyday spaces we inhabit. The work also embraces the capricious nature of the University’s Park campus environment. Alice has assembled provisional forms with radical presence and a specificity of language that retain an essential lightness.
“We want the exhibition to be an invitation for everyone to engage with contemporary art, whether they are students, staff or members of the wider community. I believe that arts have an important role in connecting people and creating opportunities for shared experiences.
“Alice Sheppard Fidler’s exhibition begins a series of curated exhibitions at Elwes Gallery centred on Gloucestershire’s sculptural heritage and women sculptors in particular. Elwes Gallery is a curated exhibition space at the centre of Park Campus that creates dialogue between the past and future of visual arts practice.”
Elwes Gallery is situated in the atrium of the main reception at Park Campus, which is home to a connected community of artists and creators studying courses from fine art and graphic design to film and TV production, journalism, music, photography and computer games development.
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