Alice Aycock was artist-in-residence at the USF Art Department in 1980 when the site-specific sculpture How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts: Collected Ghost Stories from the Workhouse was created at the College of Fine Arts with the assistance of faculty and students. The large-scale, outside, partly motorized sculpture, constructed of metal, glass, steel, and wood, was dismantled in the early 1990s. However, two prints made contemporarily at Graphicstudio document the work and its process in isometric diagrams and explanatory texts and quotes.
Aycock’s artistic vision embraces sculpture, architecture, industrial processes and inventions, philosophy, history, and archaeology, among other disciplines. Aycock has explained that “For this piece I was inspired by devices and apparatus that I found in various history books on technology. The devices were archaic 18th century and 19th century objects that are no longer relevant…The piece is in large part my interpretation of the history of invention…”
Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1946 and received an M.A. from Hunter College. She has created installations around the world, notably at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyna Beach, and the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville. She lives and works in New York City.
