Alice Instone makes paintings concerned with gender and power and frequently depicts influential or well known public figures. She started working as an artist in 2005.

Her solo exhibitions include the The House of St Barnabas Soho Square (a former refuge for destitute women), The House of Commons (for a series on powerful women), The Royal Society of Arts, Northampton Museum and BBB Gallery Shoreditch. The locations, which also include a former brothel, are frequently an extension of the project. Described in The Independent as 'young, female and tipped for the top', she has been interviewed by Jenni Murray for Radio 4's Woman's Hour, selected as a Woman of Achievement 2010 by Woman of the Year and shortlisted for the Shell Women of the Future Award. Her work is held in several public collections and has been sponsored by Ernst & Young and Herbert Smith.

Instone's recent body of work Because A Fire Was In My Head takes its title from a Yeats poem. Once again the artist draws attention to how we consume images of women and the female archetype, from the dangerous seductress to the alluring innocent. Rather than using the familiarity of celebrities to engage us in her narrative, this time she uses a number of found images, from Bronzino's Venus, to Snow White. Caitlin Moran writes in The Times: "Although all the [paintings] are stunning, perhaps my favourite is the eponymous one... a painful, disturbing and new image of womanhood."

The House of Fallen Women, Instone's 2010 exhibition, focused on infamous women from history. 'The life stories of the women [Instone] has chosen to portray send shudders down the spine... Sex and scandal, the cutting down to size, the mocking of appearance, the relentless desire of society to pack women into neat little boxes - and, of course, the bizarre need to "punish" every woman who's no better than she should be. The women in Instone's paintings paid the highest price for their "transgressions". We don't have to, and the very least we can do is raise a glass to them in all their bad, wild, brave, magnificent glory.' (India Knight in The Evening Standard and accompanying book.)

Instone's choice of models, reflects her ongoing theme of female notoriety, including Emilia Fox as Marie Antoinette, Annie Lennox as Elizabeth I, Laura Bailey as Guinevere, Cherie Blair as Eleanor of Acquitaine, Jo Wood as Madame de Pompadour, Pattie Boyd as Boudica, Emma Freud as Lady Emma Hamilton and Alice Temperley as Mata Hari for The House of Fallen Women. For In History Anonymous Was A Woman, a number of women noted for their influence sat, including Baroness Scotland, Baroness Greenfield, Baroness Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti CBE, Nicole Farhi CBE, Val Gooding CBE, Dianne Thompson CBE, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Dame Jackie Wilson and Cherie Blair when she was in Downing Street. The Sunday Telegraph said: 'They are among the most well-known women in Britain but the chances are that you have never seen them like this before. Alice Instone's work challenges the way women are traditionally portrayed'. Her exhibition Interview With A Shoe included the personal stories behind the favourite shoes of Elle Macpherson, Bianca Jagger, Sir Peter Blake, Sir David Hare, Beverley Knight and Baron Woolf amongst others.

Instone studied at Kings College London and the Courtauld Institute. She lives and works in London.

"I'm fascinated by how we consume images of women. I want to make the women in my paintings the opposite of passive... disturbing the paint by messing it up in some way - dripping paint running down the canvas, disrupting the surface. Sensuous - but also disquieting" Alice Instone