3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
May 28 – June 1, 2025
2025.5.28 – 6.1
Effigy
A Solo Exhibition by artist Alice Laura Palmer, EFFIGY, is an interactive painting performance that investigates the entanglement of trauma, neuroethology, and the mechanics of image-making as a methodology for embodied research. In this second iteration, the work revisits the limbic system not only as a physiological structure but as a conceptual site—an analogue for space where instinct, emotion, and memory coalesce. The performance frames trauma not as rupture, but as a condition that obscures and reorganises perception, challenging the primacy of cognition in the formation of selfhood. A sculptural model of the limbic system is presented as a central subject. Gallery participants are invited to rotate this form as I attempt to map it in real time through painting. The surface of the canvas becomes a responsive system—a spatialised record of sensory negotiation and cognitive latency. This recursive loop between body, object, and gesture reflects the neurological processes through which reality is constructed, filtered, and made legible. Informed by my academic training in classical painting (Florence Academy of Art), the project deliberately situates technical observation within a broader framework of phenomenological and neuroscientific inquiry. Here, painting is not merely representational but epistemological: a means of exploring how interior states are rendered visible, and how knowledge emerges from the interaction between perception and material. The limbic system is the fulcrum and focus of investigation. As a neuronal structure it mediates deep cognitive intuition, creating the instincts surrounding love, sex, gender, fear, self identity, anxiety and memory. It functions as a liminal threshold between sensation and interpretation, where embodied truth precedes language. ‘EFFIGY’ proposes painting as a direct analog to research itself: a durational, participatory act through which hidden structures of the self may be glimpsed, if never fully captured, much like our experience of the external, floating world.
Alice Laura Palmer’s early artistic exposure was through her various roles in small scale zine publications, street art, counterculture graphic design, and in publishing as an illustrator magazines. Her interest in technical art making was present before her studies in Science and Arts at the University of Western Australia, and following her studies there she undertook the full 3 year advanced painting training at the Florence Academy of Art. Over these years she produced a variety of drawing, prints, painting and sculpture while maintaining her connections with the publication world. Following graduation she hosted a major show of work to debut the prestigious Glade Art Foundation in Houston, Texas (Odyssey), and was shown in New York, Australia and Houston for three years as she established her studio practice. During this time she was a finalist in several major Australian art awards (Kilgour, Brett Whitely Travelling Scholarship, Manning Gallery Naked and Nude, Black Swan/Lester Prize salon des refuses et al), and has shown in several group shows (West End Art Space ‘Dutch Project’, Frances Keevil ‘Reflection’, Dacia Gallery Holiday Group Show). Following her move to Woodburn Creatives in Sydney, she has had two major solo shows of work (Bodies of Work, Intercept) and is working on a confirmed solo with AK Bellinger Gallery, titled ‘Gnomon’ (dates arranged for July 2025). With her involvement with ‘Voices’ and her following solo show ‘Effigy’ at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, she is also expanding her artistic practice in Korea and Japan. Most recently, she is serving as Artistic Director and Cofounder of P3 Art Collective, whose shared visual training and commission free art platforming has sold over $150k, entirely directed to the artists individual practice. She is passionate about supporting the technical Realist practice, the training of which requires a level of investment from the artist that often prevents democratic access to the profession.
