Somewhere in a dream
there is a world,
created not from memories
or unconscious thoughts;
it just happened,
that’s all
out of nowhere
and belonging to no one.
You may wander and explore,
but you may never return
to the same place twice.
The world shifts and changes with each step you take.
Don’t look back,
for the world you thought is behind you is long gone.
You no longer ask,
Where does this journey leads me
you have only just begun
and will always be.
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.