About

Image credit: Laura Page

I have had an art practice since I graduated from my BA (Hons) in 2001. However, I really consider I found my artistic voice much more recently. Following my PhD the process began in which I integrated what I had learned into my work in a lighter touch, intuitive, imaginative way, thus finding ways of working that are self-sustaining and autonomous. My practice has now become a source of solace and inspiration for me and I believe, has become more engaging to encounter.

In terms of the work that I make, my long-standing interest in showgirls informs my practice, which takes many forms: collage, photographs, drawings, video, writing, and performance. I have explored theatres as sites of self-actualisation, through photographing empty theatres in the North and focusing on the stairs that access the stage. Hollywood as a site of avant-garde art as I’m on the trail for Archipenko sculptures that turn up in chorus girl films. In my work, chorus girl troupes are networks of support and community, and strip clubs as spaces of transformation. And dreams are weapons—where I bring images from my own dreams into a context where I explore the risk as well as pleasure of the night. The thread between the works is a kind of breaching of boundaries: between showing-off and reflecting, between exhibitionism and our own interior worlds.

Bio

Alison J Carr is an artist and writer. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts, absorbing both the critical dialogue and the lure of the Hollywood facade. She worked with Leslie Dick, Natalie Bookchin, Ellen Birrell and Jo Ann Callis, developing her critical voice as well as her singing voice (taking singing lessons so that she could sing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey). Following her soujorn to LA, she returned to Sheffield to do a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where she had gained her undergraduate degree. Her book, Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl: How Do I Look? published by Routledge in 2018.

Alison has been a Terra Summer Residency fellow in Giverny, France and LoBe Gallery resident in Berlin. She was awarded an Arts Council England ‘Grants for the Arts’ award in 2017. In 2018 she became a Platform / Freelands Art Programme recipient through Site Gallery Sheffield, and a-n mentoring scheme recipient working with the curator, Lucy Day. In 2021 she was awarded ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant from ACE in round 9. She was awarded a Jerwood 1:1 grant in 2022 to experiment working with Lucy Haigton, movement artist and choreographer, leading to a collaboration that will be performed at Calm Down Dear performance festival, London, in 2023.

Alison has shown her work in internationally in LA and Berlin, and nationally in London, Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, Manchester, and Blackpool. Highlights include: curating an exhibition at the University of Huddersfield’s Market Gallery and solo exhibitions at Exchange Place, YAS, Sheffield, and Bloc Projects, Sheffield. Commissions include a new performance for S1 Artspace / Making Ways for the Construction House season of events.