A Tree’s Dream
acrylic on raw canvas
36 x 24 inches (91 x 61 cm)
2023
A Tree’s Dream
The tree,
in its consciousness,
discovers an open door.
In the hallway
He finds different seasons out of sequence,
a young child
blown over by a storm,
a midnight garden
sobbing in a hidden corner
struck by ordinary time.
The grandfather’s clock
Only ticks on Saturdays
To his utter astonishment,
the present vanishes
Yesterday goes on living forever
Alice Cao - Biography
Alice Cao is an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, and educator from Surrey, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Education (in Visual Arts) from UBC. Her work ranges from whimsical children’s illustrations and surreal paintings to dreamlike sculptures and film photography.
She is inspired by her imaginative daydreams, nature walks, poems, stories, and dream journals she has written throughout the years. Alice is experimental and playful in her approach and enjoys working with a variety of mediums to discover new ways of thinking and making. She is particularly interested in watercolour due to its beautiful unpredictability and the lively ways that it moves and interacts with each other, which allows her to explore the tug-of-war between conscious control and manipulation and the act of letting feelings and intuition take over, between the comfort of predictability and the discomfort of the unknown. Alice would compare her artistic process to the way she writes a poem: There are no instructions or steps; the work unfolds and expands as it goes, like a story coming to life.