Alison Dunhill

Alison Dunhill (born 1950) is an English artist and art historian, and also a published poet.

Biography

Born in London, Dunhill trained in Fine Art at the University of Reading under Sir Terry Frost and Rita Donagh. In the early 1970s she had a studio in Florence where she associated with some of the key figures in the Situationist International,[1] including philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, the writer Gianfranco Sanguinetti and, later, the novelist and critic Michèle Bernstein. She presented some of her recollections of that time to an audience in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.[2]

Artistic career

Dunhill was primarily a landscape painter in her earlier career, and later explored more abstract and semi-sculptural forms, including mixed media artworks inspired by the surrealist ideas of chance and the found object.[3][4]

For much of her artistic career Dunhill maintained studios in London but she now lives and works in King's Lynn, Norfolk. She has exhibited frequently; she is a Member of the National Society of Painters, Sculptors & Printmakers; and she was a founder member of the Kingsgate Workshops Trust.[5]

One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.[6] Three of her paintings, and a discussion of the techniques she used to create them from her own original photographs, were reproduced in Diana Constance's book on painting from photographs published in 1995.[7]

In 2015 she was awarded a residency at Largo das Artes (Despina), a contemporary art institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[8][9]

In July 2019 she presented new works and site-specific installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.[10]

Returning to landscape painting in her 2021 'Lockdown Landscape' exhibition, Dunhill presented some 20 new canvases, of varying sizes from 30 x 30 cm up to 100 x 140 cm, painted with acrylics and mostly without brushes, as her response to the changed and changing world of the COVID-19 lockdown.[11][12] Her account of the effect of the lockdown on her art practice is published in Now This: Reflections on Our Arts and Cultures.[13]

Selected exhibitions
  • 1984 - Kingsgate Gallery, London
  • 1990 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1992 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 1994 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1995 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 1998 - Incomes Data Services, London
  • 2003 - 'Segments', Gallery 47, London
  • 2007 - Neptune Gallery, Hunstanton
  • 2012 - 'Tall & Thin', Greyfriars Art Space, King's Lynn
  • 2013 - '47 New Works', Flow Films, London
  • 2015 - Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro
  • 2018 - 'Plaster, Parquet & Pillars', Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn
  • 2019 - 'Upscape', A/side-B/side Gallery, London
  • 2021 - 'Lockdown Landscape', Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn
  • 2023 - 'Landscapes', Brick Lane Gallery, London

(Selected from exhibition list on artist's website)[14]

Art historian

As an art historian, Dunhill completed an MPhil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman.[15][16] This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the six photographic books that Woodman compiled in her lifetime, and examines them in the context of surrealism which, Dunhill argues, was a significant influence on Woodman.[17] Her study of Woodman's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries[18] was published in re•bus in 2008.[19] Dunhill has presented papers on Woodman at academic conferences and gallery talks at the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College Dublin and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.[5]

She contributed a memoir to a 2010 Paris exhibition catalogue of the artist and psychogeographer, and sometime Situationist, Ralph Rumney, whom she had befriended in the latter years of his life;[1] and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's Women Gallerists for Tate Etc.[20][21] She also reviewed Anna Anderson's Childhood Rituals exhibition[22] at the Freud Museum in Hampstead in 2011 for Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books.[23]

Poetry

Dunhill's early poetry collection, Gig Soup Scoop, published in 1972 by a small alternative press,[24] is now a rarity.[25] She was an Arvon Foundation mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe.[26][27]

More recently, two of her prose poems were long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.[28] Also in that year two of her poems were published in the international online surrealist poetry SurVision Magazine.[29] Two further poems of hers were included in the Fenland Poetry Journal;[30] the cover art of this issue reproduces one of Dunhill's artworks.[31]

Her poetry pamphlet As Pure as Coal Dust, a winner of the James Tate International Poetry Prize,[32] was published by SurVision Books in June 2021.[33][34]

References
  1. Ralph Rumney – La Vie d'artiste. Paris: Editions Allia. 2010. pp. 22–23. ISBN 978-2-84485-391-2.
  2. "The International Situationists: A Brief Moment in Time in Florence".
  3. "The Magical World of Alison Dunhill". 4 May 2018.
  4. "Surrealist-inspired works to fill King's Lynn gallery". 14 April 2018.
  5. "Alison Dunhill, Biography".
  6. The Women Artists Diary 1989. London: The Women's Press. 1988. ISBN 978-0-7043-4134-0.
  7. Constance, Diana (1995). Painting from Photographs. London: HarperCollins. pp. 63–65, 81. ISBN 0-00-412712-9.
  8. "Despina: Artists in Residence".
  9. "EV-Largo das Artes".
  10. "CUSP Artists".
  11. "Lockdown Landscape".
  12. "A new exhibition and a new view of King's Lynn". KL Magazine (124): 132–134. September–October 2021. ISSN 2044-7965.
  13. Borlenghi, Patricia, ed. (April 2021). Now This: Reflections on Our Arts and Cultures. Manningtree, Essex: Patrician Press. pp. 11–15. ISBN 9781838 059804.
  14. "Alison Dunhill, Exhibition History".
  15. "Almost a square: The photographic books of Francesca Woodman and their relationship to surrealism". 2010.
  16. "Francesca Woodman's Books".
  17. "Francesca Woodman's Books: Introduction" (PDF).
  18. Woodman, Francesca (1981). Some disordered interior geometries. Philadelphia: Synapse Press. OCLC 11308833.
  19. Dunhill, Alison. Dialogues with Diagrams. re•bus, 2008 Autumn/Winter, issue 2.
  20. Herstatt, Claudia (2008). Women Gallerists in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. ISBN 978-3-7757-1975-9.
  21. "Books Etc".
  22. "Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals".
  23. Dunhill, Alison (May 2011). "Housebound at Freud's house". Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books.
  24. Dunhill, Alison (1972). Gig Soup Scoop. London: Transgravity Advertiser.
  25. "Gig Soup Scoop by Alison Dunhill. Transgravity Advertiser, London. Soft cover, Limited Edition - Colophon Books".
  26. Stannard, Martin, ed. Joe Soap's Canoe. Felixstowe, 1992. ISSN 0951-4864
  27. "Joe Soap's Canoe issue 15, 1992" (PDF).
  28. "Flash Fiction Prize 2020 Long-list".
  29. "SurVision Magazine / Alison Dunhill, issue 7, 2020".
  30. Dunhill, Alison. Fenland Poetry Journal. Issue 3, Autumn 2020. pp. 34, 48. ISSN 2632-8259
  31. Sennitt Clough, Elisabeth, ed. Fenland Poetry Journal. Issue 3, Autumn 2020. p. 2. ISSN 2632-8259
  32. "James Tate Prize".
  33. Dunhill, Alison (June 2021). As Pure As Coal Dust. Dublin, Ireland & Reggio di Calabria, Italy: SurVision Books. ISBN 9781912963232.
  34. "Sphinx Poetry Pamphlet Reviews".
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