About
Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer is an artist living and working in Norwich and Great Yarmouth. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, 2014, and her work is included in The Anthony Shaw Collection at York Art Gallery UK, The Letterform Archive, San Francisco, USA, and private collections in the UK, USA, Hong Kong and Japan. She has exhibited internationally and received public art commissions from the HERILIGION Project at University of East Anglia, 2019 and the National Trust, 2017. In 2022, she received a DYCP award from Arts Council England and her 2023 solo exhibition Word Parts at Standpoint Gallery London, was supported by the Henry Moore Foundation. Her first monograph, Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer: Word Parts, was published by New North Press in 2023. Residencies include Standpoint London/New North Press, 2022-23, Scuola di Grafica Venice, 2016,, Interviews South Korea, 2015 and Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 2015.
The artist’s practice explores the objecthood of language. Conducting research into the historic and myriad forms of communication such as, bookbinding, ancient ruins, scroll-making and graffiti. Her forms begin from whole sheets of mulberry paper, across which mark-making proliferates in graphite and ink. Kuzemczak-Sayer then tears the paper into strips. Here, syntax and textual wholes are physically deconstructed. Re-formed into cellular volumes as the artist re-aligns the sheets together, ink peeking from the edges of the forms. The strips are then draped over a punctuating hook, hanging and bending like fabric. Singular symbols hidden from view, instead coalescing into a fraying artifact. Such a process reveals the mutability of paper, emerging as a fluid sculptural matter, absorbent of tone and adaptive to environment.
