page_title: Alice Instone
section_title: Because a Fire Was In My Head, 2012
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Instone / Exhibitions / Because a Fire Was In My Head, 2012
caption_attribution_description: English: Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means 2017
context_page_description: Alice Instone is an English artist. She is known for making work concerned with gender, personal narrative and the similarities that bind us together; frequently collaborating with well-known public figures.
context_section_description: Instone’s 2012 solo show 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.
  
  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."
  Caitlin Moran wrote in The Times:
  "Although all the [paintings] are stunning, my favourite 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 work was exhibited The Cob Gallery in London.
caption: Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means 2017
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