Alice Instone

Early life and career

Instone grew up in East Sussex she studied English at King's College London and History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She worked as a secondary school English 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 21st Century Women, depicted 21 powerful contemporary women. The women who sat for the artist included Annie Lennox (who wrote an accompanying article on being a feminist), Cherie Blair, Patricia Scotland, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield, Fiona Bruce, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Anya Hindmarch and Shami Chakrabarti. Chris Hastings from The Telegraph wrote;

“They are among the most well-known women in Britain but the chances are that you have never seen them like this before….. Alice Instone's (work) challenges the way women are traditionally portrayed.”

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 Instone's work entitled Interview with a Shoe, a collection of portraits of people through their favourite shoes that was initially shown at BBB Gallery, Shoreditch. It included the shoes that Annie Lennox wore at the wedding of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates, plus those of Baron Woolf, Bianca Jagger, Elle Macpherson, Sir Peter Blake Nicole Farhi, Sir David Hare, Cherie Blair, Liz and Terry de Havilland, Laura Bailey, Emma Freud, Pat Cash, Alice Temperley, Joe Corre and Beverley Knight. Jennie Murray interviewed her about the exhibition for Radio 4 Woman’s Hour in May 2009.

In 2010 her series titled, The House of the Fallen Woman opened at The House of St Barnabas in Soho (a former refuge for destitute women, portraying infamous women from history. The work played on the theme of female 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.

The exhibition included a series of prints of the different words for ‘a female of loose morals’ entitled Slag Spiral, which were also exhibited in a former brothel in Archer Street, Soho.

Caitlin Moran wrote in The Times:

Although all the [paintings] are stunning, perhaps my favourite is the eponymous one: five naked models, draped in electric-blue swags, with gold paint dripping over them from the ceiling. It reminds me of the story of the tram crash that injured the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Impaled on a massive shard of metal, Kahlo came round to discover that someone on the tram had been carrying a tin of gold paint, and she was now covered in it. Gilded like a living human idol. A painful, disturbing and new image of womanhood.

The Independent and the Daily Mail wrote: ‘Rich and ruthless how Cherie Blair sees herself?’ based on Cherie Blair’s choice of Eleanor of Acquitaine, to which Instone replied in an open letter stating that:

‘The work draws parallels with how we still predominantly view powerful and influential women in a negative way! The [newspaper] article.... fails to mention [Cherie Blair’s] unpaid charity work or her foundation helping women all round the world [nor] her similarly formidable intellect, used in her work as a human rights barrister... A subheading in the article says ‘being married to a latter-day Eleanor of Aquitaine is a hazard that Tony Blair could do without now he has opted for a quieter life’ does that mean a more satisfactory wife would be similarly quiet, or less prone to having opinions and a will of her own? ...it struck me that surely that’s an observation that people must have made about Eleanor almost 1,000 years ago.’

In 2012 Instone’s solo show Because A Fire Was In My Head opened at The Cob Gallery in London and explored the role of the female muse in history and art history. The title of the show is a line from a W B Yeats poem. Instone stated that the sexually charged paintings aimed to express the conviction that painting and making marks on a surface can achieve a sense of reality like no other medium.

Gary Lineker tweeted,

‘Made a little purchase of an @aliceinstone painting that Mrs L sat for. I'd post a pic but my younger followers might not cope!’

The depiction of a breastfeeding woman in the painting Pax prompted Baroness Helena Kennedy QC to write,

“I love this painting. Any woman who has breastfed knows the experience of shooting milk darts with abandon. It makes me laugh that people are so squeamish about lactating breasts. We are happy to have women’s nakedness draped over cars and festooning page 3 but the very function for which breasts primarily exist so often evokes grunts of disapproval or prim censure. Alice has captured the sensuousness of the whole business. It’s beautiful.”

Instone’s large scale paintings are characterised by dripping paint, use of gold, intense light and dark and focus on the sitter to the almost complete exclusion of everything else. Her tiny Victoriana-style miniatures use antique dageurreotype cases containing forgotten early photographs and are painted on glass.

Solo exhibitions

Collections

Personal life

Instone married Hugh Billett at Chelsea Register Office in 2002, and has a daughter (born 2008) and a son (born 2011).