About

Hello. I’m Alison and I love understanding the present through a lens of the past. Inspired by the central European Renaissance, in particular the layers of meaning, the acceptance of paradoxes, keen observation, and making choices about subject to communicate ideas, I create images that resonate through time.

I research objects and ideas of the past, usually from regions that are now Britain but often European too, and consider the material culture of time and place and how that context is understood today, and through historians of various points in history. Writers such as Cynthia Harnett, Allan Fea, and Hilary Mantel are a big influence on me – they used historical moments and breathed life in them for others to connect to the past as strongly as they did.

Oil painting gives me a literal connection to the techniques of the past; using sight size drawing, pigments ground in oil, and relying on the whims of natural light means that the challenges and joys of my practice have a direct thread to countless painters before me.

I was a ballet dancer, then data scientist, with a career via the British Museum… you can see my CV on LinkedIn.

After many years of creating and delivering projects commissioned through others I am now working independently.