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.

Artistic career

Dunhill was primarily a landscape painter in her early career, and then explored more abstract forms, including mixed media artworks inspired by the surrealist ideas of chance and the found object.[2][3]

For much of her artistic career Dunhill maintained studios in London but she now lives and works in King's Lynn, Norfolk where she has a studio in the 15th century Hanseatic warehouse known as Hanse House. In 2015 she was awarded a residency at Despina (previously known as Largo das Artes), a contemporary art institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[4] She has exhibited frequently, most recently in London in February 2019 with a solo exhibition of new and recent work;[5][6] and in July 2019 she presented new works and installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.[7]

One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.[8]

Art historian

As an art historian, Dunhill completed an M.Phil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman.[9] 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.[10] Her study of Woodman's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries[11] was published in re•bus in 2008.[12] 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.[13]

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; and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's Women Gallerists for Tate Etc.[14][15]

Poetry

Dunhill's early poetry collection, Gig Soup Scoop, published in 1972 by a small alternative press,[16] is now a rarity.[17] She was an Arvon Foundation mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe.[18][19] Two of her prose poems were recently long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.[20] Her latest publication is in the international online surrealist poetry SurVision Magazine.[21]

Selected solo exhibitions[22]
  • 1984 - Kingsgate Gallery, London
  • 1990 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1992 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 1994 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
  • 1995 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
  • 2003 - 'Segments', Gallery 47, London
  • 2007 - Neptune Gallery, Hunstanton
  • 2013 - Flow Films, London
  • 2015 - Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro
  • 2018 - Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn
  • 2019 - 'Upscape', A/side-B/side Gallery, London

References
  1. Ralph Rumney – La Vie d'artiste. Paris: Editions Allia. 2010. pp. 22–23. ISBN 978-2-84485-391-2.
  2. "The Magical World of Alison Dunhill". 4 May 2018.
  3. "Surrealist-inspired works to fill King's Lynn gallery". 14 April 2018.
  4. "Despina: Artists in Residence".
  5. "Exhibition: Upscape - ArtUPcycling".
  6. "Alison Dunhill, Exhibition History".
  7. "CUSP Artists".
  8. "The Women Artists Diary 1989". London, The Women's Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-7043-4134-0
  9. "Almost a square: The photographic books of Francesca Woodman and their relationship to surrealism". 2010.
  10. "Francesca Woodman's Books: Introduction" (PDF).
  11. Woodman, Francesca. Some disordered interior geometries. Philadelphia: Synapse Press, 1981. OCLC 11308833
  12. Dunhill, Alison. Dialogues with Diagrams. re•bus, 2008 Autumn/Winter, issue 2.
  13. "About Alison Dunhill".
  14. Herstatt, Claudia. Women Gallerists in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7757-1975-9
  15. "Books Etc".
  16. Dunhill, Alison. Gig Soup Scoop. London: Transgravity Advertiser, February 1972.
  17. "Gig Soup Scoop by Alison Dunhill. Transgravity Advertiser, London. Soft cover, Limited Edition - Colophon Books".
  18. Stannard, Martin, ed. Joe Soap's Canoe. Felixstowe, 1992. ISSN 0951-4864
  19. "Joe Soap's Canoe issue 15, 1992" (PDF).
  20. "Flash Fiction Prize 2020 Long-list".
  21. "SurVision Magazine / Alison Dunhill, issue 7, 2020".
  22. "Alison Dunhill, Exhibition History".
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