Alice Edy (b. 1987, Johannesburg) is an artist working on Wurundjeri Land, Brunswick, Naarm/Melbourne.
Edy holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne, 2023),
and Masters in English Literature from the University of Cape Town (2016).

Before immigrating to Australia in 2017, Edy exhibited across South Africa, including at Kalashnikovv Gallery (Johannesburg), Salon91 (Cape Town), and Nirox Sculpture Park (Cradle of Mankind, Maropeng), where she completed a month-long artist residency culminating at the "Words" Arts and Literary festival (2016).
Her large-scale public installations include a 30m calligraphic mural on the Nelson Mandela Bridge in Newtown, Johannesburg. Upon graduating from the VCA in 2023, Edy was the recipient of the NGVWA Award.

Edy currently maintains a full-time creative studio practice in Melbourne, working across the visual arts as a painter, illustrator, tattoo artist and graphic recorder.

Bio

Alice Edy’s large-scale paintings explore the intersection of mnemonics, language, and typography. Inspired by the neuroscience/mysticism of the deep and ancient human instinct to draw, combined with her prior training in calligraphy, Edy’s works inquire into how we use art as a tool to “think” outside of our bodies.

Informed by cartography and typographic fragments, and via multiple layers of expressive marks, her paintings sit at the threshold between writing and image. Her works enact the processes of memory: layering, erasure, obscuring, repetition and reorganisation. Marks hover between meanings; evoking letterforms, codes, weather systems, Paleolithic cave art, maps, bodily traces and mnemonic echos.

The paintings are exercises in immersion, presence, and flow. Edy invites the viewer to consider how we extend and expand consciousness outside of our minds, via embodied dialogues with the material world.

Artist Statement

Upcoming Exhibitions

  • “Sensuous Field” with Sarah Firth. December 2026, Melbourne, Australia.